SOIL by Katharine Meynell was launched at Matt’s Gallery, London, yesterday (Friday 20 September), with a superb performance and reading (from the book) by Meynell from beneath a thick and very heavy blanket of soil and turf. Thank you to all involved, and to everyone for coming along.
This is a photo I took during the performance. That’s Robin Klassnik of Matt’s Gallery standing at the left of the picture. Up to half the print run of SOIL was given away following the performance.
Piece of Paper Press Publication Launch Katharine Meynell, SOIL (POPP.044) 20 September 2024, 6-8pm Etc. Space at Matt’s Gallery
Join us at Matt’s Gallery, London, for the launch of SOIL by Katharine Meynell, a publication released in a numbered limited edition of 150 copies by Piece of Paper Press. Up to half of the print run will be given away free during the evening. Strictly one copy per person, while stocks last.
UPDATE: These are just back from the printers BTW and they look GREAT… Behind the scenes news: Katharine and I are going to get a bit of a production line going later today to make up the finished books ready for numbering… I’ll take some photos. Don’t forget to come along to Matt’s next Friday if you’d like to get your hands on a copy!
SOIL is a text work distilled from images, events and performances created during a residency at Live Art Ireland, Tipperary in 2023 – a period of time that Meynell dedicated to thinking and reading about and working with soil. A video work of the same name was recently screened on MattFlix. The text reproduced in SOIL was first performed at Live Art Ireland, and documented in the video; part love poem, part spell, and threaded through with acrostics and word games, this edition strips away that larger work to reveal a joyful and productive residue, rich in life, ‘where matter meets in past and future…composing becoming’.
The hand-made and ephemeral character of the Piece of Paper Press format addresses itself to the way that Meynell ‘domesticates the tools of her trade… It becomes simply that medium which is at hand when a certain moment occurs or a certain event takes place.’ (Andrea Phillips, Lux Online)
Attention, collectors! News just in from The Fountain in the Forest publisher Faber and Faber that the first edition ‘royale’-format trade paperback, featuring Luke Brown’s dazzling and influential cover design with its striking neon-green typography is now out of stock at the warehouse. What this means is that right now whatever copies might still be out with retailers are the last of it.
So if you missed out on this beautiful first edition with its stunning flourescent colourway, you might still be in with a chance to snap up one of the last copies if you see one – but as ever, when they’re gone they’re gone!
Behind the scenes, occasionally ‘the writing life’™ means applying for things: residencies, fellowships, tendering processes, commissions, open-submission grants and awards, teaching posts, etc. Sometimes the applications are successful, and sometimes they’re not. I pulled together these scrapbook-style screengrabs of tweets and posts about The Fountain in the Forest to paste into a pitching document a while back, and thought they may be of interest here!
Thanks so much to London-based artist (and discerning reader!) Linda Khatri for sending this gorgeous photo and for kind words about the novel — I love it when readers finish one of my books and message me a photo…
It is a huge thrill to share the news that I have been appointed a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, and from September for two days a week I’ll be based at Royal Holloway University of London.
Around 40 Fellowships are awarded every year, and the 2024-25 cohort were invited to St Bride’s Institute off Fleet Street in central London recently for the New Fellows’ induction day. I didn’t quite get to meet everybody, but it was an inspiring day, and an unusual privilege to meet so many interesting writers in one place and on a level playing field, all of us starting out in this new role and new adventure.
Founded in 1790, the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) is a UK charity that annually delivers over £5 million in grants, education, and outreach programmes. Since 1999, the RLF’s Fellowship scheme for writers in Higher Education has created earning opportunities for over 750 professional writers at over 100 universities and institutions, where Fellows have a brief to offer free and confidential writing advice to anybody that wants it.
I took this kaleidoscopic photo of Royal Holloway’s Grade 1-listed Founders’ Building on a bright clear day back in the spring, when I went to meet my new hosts. Opened in 1886, and designed by architect William Henry Crossland (1835-1908) – a pupil of Sir George Gilbert-Scott – it’s easy to see why Pevsner’s Surrey calls it the ‘most ebullient Victorian building in the Home Counties’!
It’s a small thing, but I’m really thrilled to report that as of today, if you visit the website of the Crime Writers’ Association, you will find that a new sub-genre category has been added to the navigation: ‘experimental/postmodern’.
Of course I don’t only write crime, but I’ve been arguing for this addition behind the scenes for a while, including with a 2018 Guardian ‘Top Ten Experimental Thrillers’ feature, with a recent article for Red Herrings (the in-house journal of the CWA), and in correspondence with former CWA Vice Chair the author Antony Johnston, and with current CWA Chair and author Vaseem Khan. And it was Vaseem who – in an email – came up with this particular formulation – ‘Experimental/postmodern’ – which I think is more self-explanatory and inclusive than the slightly more obscure term ‘Anti-detective’.
As a member of the CWA this is a big deal for me, and for anyone else working at the more experimental or avant-garde end of crime writing as I have been since my ‘avant-pulp’ novel Charlieunclenorfolktango (1999), because this means that books and writing that were once seen by influential literary critics in the field such as Julian Symons as anathema, and practically an existential threat to the genre, can now be accommodated within the crime fiction community, their contribution and vitality recognised, rather than being seen as somehow ‘not proper crime writing.’ Speaking personally, it means that I can now describe my work more accurately in the CWA’s ‘Find an author’ function, and moving forward, that more experimental writing and writers might be recognised and welcomed into the CWA.
Many thanks indeed to the the CWA board for agreeing to and implementing this change. I can’t wait to see how authors and readers make use of this new opportunity.
I was very pleased to learn that my 2023 detective short story ‘Atelier Diocletian II (figures after Ivan Martinac)’ has been included in the official Ivan Martinac bibliography (‘Reviews of Martinac’s character and works published since his death’)on the website dedicated to the work of the late film director, whose work I encountered for the first time while I was writer in residence in Split in 2018 with Udruga KURS.
(Incidentally, the whole Martinac site is well worth a long browse around even for English-speakers, as while it is Croatian language throughout, it includes digitized versions of many of his short films, any of which I would highly recommend.)
Commissioned for Richard Skinner’s excellent book of film essays The Hinge of a Metaphor, ‘Atelier Diocletian II’ is a detective story that takes the form of a Coroner’s interim report into the unexplained death of a UK citizen in the city of Split, Croatia.
When it came out, the story made the papers in Croatia, since the work of Martinac is little known outside the city of Split and in certain underground film circles.
Indeed, the author and film critic Jurica Pavičić points out in his piece for Croatian daily Jutarnji List (£) that
Outside that circle, Martinac was almost unknown, so unknown that the day after his death the paper you are reading published the wrong photo.
A free PDF of Pavičić’s piece is included in the bibliography also, so I make it available here also:
And here comes the interesting part. Recounting a fictional investigation that combs through the Split art scene, White brings real people and places from the culture of the city into the story. They are mentioned as ‘witnesses’ in the story: Renato Baretić, Ivica Ivanišević, translator Dražen Čulić, and the director and president of Split Kino Club Sunčica Fradelić. Even the meeting place of local journalists and writers is mentioned, Konoba Hvaranin and its owner Vinko Radovani. As a literary character, your author too found himself in the story. The fictitious Jurica Pavičić explains to the Croatian-British investigation that he had conversations with the murdered man and realized that he was becoming increasingly obsessed with Martinac. The fictional me and the fictional Fradelić help the investigation to understand the intention of the quote deceased.
Pavičić concludes his article by hoping that my ‘moving homage’ might help Martinac’s classic films reach a wider audience outside of the city.
Hvala Jurica! I hope so too.
And I also hope it is not too long before I can visit Split again.
Film still – Ivan Martinac, ‘Atelier Dioklecijan’ (1967)
Pictured here in the spring of 1987 aged 23, I was studying for a degree in Fine Art at Psalter Lane, part of the then Sheffield City Polytechnic. Clearly my Fine Art degree course wasn’t nearly Mickey Mouse enough…
The photo, by my friend and fellow Fine Art student Brett Dee, was a first attempt at a publicity image for the spoken word performances I was doing on the margins of the UK performance art scene of the time. Juvenilia mostly, but it was by going to art school in my early twenties and by testing those early prose sketches and routines in front of live audiences around the country, then revising and testing again, that I discovered I was actually a writer. In London in the early nineties all of that quickly evolved into writing prose fiction, which is more or less what I’ve been doing ever since.
I can confidently say that without public libraries and arts education in schools and in further and higher education I wouldn’t be an author today.
Creative subjects in the arts and humanities can (and in my case did) lead to a professional life in the arts and creative industries. They are not the only way in, of course, but cutting access to arts education – or limiting such access only to the wealthy or the already-privileged – is cutting off the creative industries at the root, and taking life-enhancing educational and employment opportunities away from working class young people, and those from other excluded communities, as well as diminishing the quality and diversity of what might be available to audiences.
The value of Arts and Humanities degrees cannot solely be measured – as those in power cynically suggest – by the salary of the first job you do upon leaving college.
Among other things, the arts, arts education generally, and the Arts and Humanities in higher education can also bring life-enhancing thought, knowledge, scholarship, understanding and appreciation, great teaching and education, a sense of agency, self-expression, empowerment, and lead to deep (life-long) engagements with ideas, with craft, with audiences and readers and a network of peers. They can entertain, contribute to our surroundings, to the built environment, the body of human thought, and the quality of public space and discourse; create new and life-changing opportunities, experiences, concepts and products; create employment opportunities, and bring critical and analytical, research, reading, writing, questioning, listening, making, logistical, production and organisational skills, and confidence (among a multitude of other benefits), that might be of ready application in all walks and aspects of life and work and play.
Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london 
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