Home, Again
1.
I moved back to Birmingham because I had to.
It was post-COVID, late ‘21, pandemic ephemera everywhere: lonely hand-sanitising stations, QR codes embossed onto pub tables, blue facemasks still occasionally hanging from a train passenger’s ear or mashed into the mud of a kerb’s crease.
I’d been away for over a decade, studying in — but crucially not at — Oxford. Towards the end of my time there I started a creative writing MA at City University, commuting to London twice a week from Oxford Parkway. The pandemic cut the course short though and I finished the novel it required for completion from a tiny locked-down flat and attended my graduation ceremony online.
Shortly after that, the end of the dominant relationship of my twenties — and thereafter a crack-up. I had to move back to Birmingham sharpish. I’ve written elsewhere about the toll this took — mentally, fiscally, romantically. The recovery was quick (I met someone new), then slow (that ended too). Slower still was my financial recovery which, thinking about it, can’t be called that at all because it has yet to happen. (I’m trying to write my way out of it. It’s purgatorial. Commissions come and go, little projects, promises. I chase their invoices like a racing snake and get paid many months after. Every so often something comes along that’s more exciting than money could ever touch and my enthusiasm starts popping like a Geiger counter.)
My main worry when returning to Brum three years ago, however, was that my work would suffer for it. Here I don’t mean my remunerated employment (back then I was working in hospitality, hating it), or the gig-economy copy I allude to above, but the stuff that was, at the point, still mostly for me: my fiction writing.
I was in Oxford, see, site of a thousand campus novels, world-historic, literarily famous, academia under vaulted ceilings, magnum opuses beneath the flying buttresses, home and school to so many artists I have revered. Never mind that that aspect of the city was off-limits to me — outside of the university and away from its staggering buildings, Oxford is just another place — and never mind that in the decade plus that I’d lived there the only progress I’d made was to be accepted onto a writing programme that had nothing to do with being in Oxford at all. I was stubbornly insistent; clung to the idea that I had to be there; something about connections, chance encounters, all that bollocks; the idea that any patron of the pub I worked in opposite the Bodleian and next door to the beautiful flagship Blackwell’s could be an “in”. The reality was that pulling pints in that kind of proximity was as close as I got. I ignored the class connotations and carried on. When I left, I felt like the slim chance of making anything from my art was about to be made slimmer still by Birmingham.
If that sounds familiarly snide and disrespectful, then please understand that it was more that Birmingham was Home, and Home then, at 18, 19, was something to unmoor yourself from, split off, form new country. I’d read enough Künstlerromane to know that leaving home was an artistic prerequisite, especially if you wanted to write about it.
In a way I was right. I wanted to author my family and where I grew up but it took moving away to realise and achieve that. I just wish I hadn’t slagged home off so hurtfully in the process. If I started out as a teenager trying to test Mark Twain’s assertion that “charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth”, I ended my late twenties stating, to my shame — and under Southern influence — that Birmingham — that Home — was a shithole.
2.It was post-COVID, late ‘21, pandemic ephemera everywhere: lonely hand-sanitising stations, QR codes embossed onto pub tables, blue facemasks still occasionally hanging from a train passenger’s ear or mashed into the mud of a kerb’s crease.
I’d been away for over a decade, studying in — but crucially not at — Oxford. Towards the end of my time there I started a creative writing MA at City University, commuting to London twice a week from Oxford Parkway. The pandemic cut the course short though and I finished the novel it required for completion from a tiny locked-down flat and attended my graduation ceremony online.
Shortly after that, the end of the dominant relationship of my twenties — and thereafter a crack-up. I had to move back to Birmingham sharpish. I’ve written elsewhere about the toll this took — mentally, fiscally, romantically. The recovery was quick (I met someone new), then slow (that ended too). Slower still was my financial recovery which, thinking about it, can’t be called that at all because it has yet to happen. (I’m trying to write my way out of it. It’s purgatorial. Commissions come and go, little projects, promises. I chase their invoices like a racing snake and get paid many months after. Every so often something comes along that’s more exciting than money could ever touch and my enthusiasm starts popping like a Geiger counter.)
My main worry when returning to Brum three years ago, however, was that my work would suffer for it. Here I don’t mean my remunerated employment (back then I was working in hospitality, hating it), or the gig-economy copy I allude to above, but the stuff that was, at the point, still mostly for me: my fiction writing.
I was in Oxford, see, site of a thousand campus novels, world-historic, literarily famous, academia under vaulted ceilings, magnum opuses beneath the flying buttresses, home and school to so many artists I have revered. Never mind that that aspect of the city was off-limits to me — outside of the university and away from its staggering buildings, Oxford is just another place — and never mind that in the decade plus that I’d lived there the only progress I’d made was to be accepted onto a writing programme that had nothing to do with being in Oxford at all. I was stubbornly insistent; clung to the idea that I had to be there; something about connections, chance encounters, all that bollocks; the idea that any patron of the pub I worked in opposite the Bodleian and next door to the beautiful flagship Blackwell’s could be an “in”. The reality was that pulling pints in that kind of proximity was as close as I got. I ignored the class connotations and carried on. When I left, I felt like the slim chance of making anything from my art was about to be made slimmer still by Birmingham.
If that sounds familiarly snide and disrespectful, then please understand that it was more that Birmingham was Home, and Home then, at 18, 19, was something to unmoor yourself from, split off, form new country. I’d read enough Künstlerromane to know that leaving home was an artistic prerequisite, especially if you wanted to write about it.
In a way I was right. I wanted to author my family and where I grew up but it took moving away to realise and achieve that. I just wish I hadn’t slagged home off so hurtfully in the process. If I started out as a teenager trying to test Mark Twain’s assertion that “charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth”, I ended my late twenties stating, to my shame — and under Southern influence — that Birmingham — that Home — was a shithole.
Robert Frost wrote that home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I didn’t know it then, but that was as true for me at the arse-end of 2021 as it is today. Because Birmingham took me in. Half healed me. After a period of uprooted mental destruction I am now surrounded by family and old friends, making home with my partner and her astonishing daughter. I’m still skint, but who isn’t?
The things that besieged me in my twenties are still a frittering concern, of course. My fetishes and fantasies and angers and resentments. But they are lessened by a city doing its best under intolerable conditions: the council is broke and the bins are piling up, boiling under a cancerous sun, but still all I see is Brummies and those transplanted here trying to make it work with a fuck-it attitude both softened and strengthened by sardony, a self-preserving defence that manifests itself as a shoulder shrug, as good a weapon against adversity as any I know.
Most importantly, the imagined literary community I feared leaving behind in Oxford actually exists here. Things are happening, and happening despite abhorrent and definitive arts cuts (all council funding will cease within a year), rank philistinism that further pushes art into the hands of those who could already afford to take time off and make it anyway. (The country is an abattoir, but expect many more novels about middle-class people who had to share a flat in London once or torturous harangues from people who went to Trinity and suffered micro-aggressions at their postgraduate publishing jobs.)
Still, in the face of this I have found what I was looking for. Brum is flensing its image of Not London But Not The North, Either. And while there is still blatant derision towards Birmingham from a Zone 3-obsessed literary media, it remains that the book-scene here is blooming.
As proof, perhaps my own pipeline might be instructive.
After years of nothingness in Oxford — there were no writer’s nights, no events that weren’t Ian McEwan, the open mic at Catweazle Club was welcoming but a closed clique unless you played the panpipes — there was a sea-change for me personally on an introductory night out for those writers who had been accepted into Digbeth Stories, the first anthology from Floodgate Press, a new and exciting and Brum-based publisher. (My accepted story, my first ever in a print publication, was called You Can Go Home Again.) I went along and met not only the team at Floodgate, but also Clive Judd, one half of Digbeth’s Voce Books, to my mind the greatest and most dedicated stockists and sellers of independent and small-press titles in the world. To anybody who knows Voce, it’s absolutely no surprise that they have been called a temple to independent publishing by The Guardian and voted one of the UK’s best independent bookshops by the Times in 2024. In a Time Out write-up about Europe’s best city breaks for 2025, Voce was namechecked by Grace Beard as one of the buzziest places to visit in a city “humming with new energy”. Clive and his partner Maria are at the vanguard of Birmingham’s burgeoning literary scene; anything worthwhile happening in this city could feasibly be attributed to them.
It was at one of their very first events that I met the team at Repeater/Zer0 Books, who in time agreed to publish my first novel (title TBC; released later this year). Also in time Clive and I set up STORIE, a bi-monthly night of prose readings hosted at Kilder bar, in association with Voce. For each event we invite four writers to read their longform works in progress, our focus on fairly lengthy readings of prose a rebellion against Reel-infested attention spans and the idea that Booktok-inspired pithy is the preferable conduit for literary expression. So far we have programmed over 40 writers of all stripes — from established prize-winners to unpublished, emerging talent — the majority of whom have been from Birmingham or nearby. What started out as an intimate evening under Kilder’s soft white light has become an always sold-out affair, my very favourite night(s) of the year.
From that nothingness, then, a whole store of things to chase and cherish, a couple of kicks away instead of leagues and lightyears. I’m not quite there yet: the traumatised person’s tendency towards catastrophising despair still bobs away in front of me like a navigational buoy. (It warns of deep water, and complacency.) But I’m closer than I have ever been.
If this seems like a culmination of hard work (it’s not novel for nothing and then everything to happen for a writer) rather than something fostered by being back in Birmingham specifically, then know that it’s not just me. Brummie writers are popping up all over the shop:
Both Malachi McIntosh and Charlie Hill were shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, with Malachi winning the Debut Prize for Parables, Fables, Nightmares, a collection put out by The Emma Press, who operate out of the Jewellery Quarter.
Liz Churchill and Garrie Fletcher, STORIE alumni both, were longlisted for The Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Liz runs a fiction night of her own called Old Mo Stories. Garrie is one third of Floodgate, who have so far put out two outstanding collections of regional writing, Night Time Economy following on from Digbeth Stories.
Another third of Floodgate, Nigel Proctor, has just recently launched his first novel, and later in the year Floodgate will put out the latest collection from Alan Beard.
Bradley Taylor has also just released his first book, a debut collection of poetry which he will launch at the Heath, Birmingham’s other great bookshop. He read at the inaugural STORIE and runs The Overcoat open-mic night in King’s Heath.
Another STORIE performer’s first book is also due out, with Sasha Butler’s ‘The Marriage Contract’ forthcoming from Salt.
Kieran Goddard’s Brum-set ‘I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning’ was longlisted for the Gordon Burn prize. Its TV adaptation has been picked up by the BBC. They’re filming it in Shard End.
There are other examples I’ve missed, Brum books and writers budding like flowers in the kerb strip. One comes to me now, unbidden: Elizabeth O’Connor, who read at STORIE #7 and whose Whale Fall was just longlisted for the Ondaatje prize. Still there are more. That I can’t name them all is telling. For a city so often forgotten, it feels nice to forget.