The Art of the Graft: On Taylor Burns’ ‘Trav’
The place Taylor comes from isn’t remarkable. The work he has made from it is. To push through every economic and cultural barrier and remake your world with words—to look at all that mess and find beauty in it—takes fucking guts. I know; I’m from there too. It means growing up in a social order that, for boys, made you a “gayboy” (back when that was supposedly the worst thing you could be), or, for girls, made you someone who loved the sound of her own voice. (Hello.)
We both did it anyway, through all those years when it was hardest. Taylor has arrived at a moment where this book feels like an antidote to the growing homogenisation of working-class writing, the bastardisation and co-option of stories born on our estates. Stories that begin in places like ours but are often sanded down into something more palatable before they reach the page. This is something many of us are feeling the tension of in Birmingham, one that seems to be running away from us: the “bab-ification” of every cultural moment. It’s being lifted out of our arms and turned into something unrecognisable and then printed on tote bags. Through all this Taylor has become, along with a handful of excellent people, central to a growing literary scene, where class politics drive the conversation and where so many of us can relax into the work, without feeling the tension of middle class performance.
I couldn’t wait to get my copy. I know how hard Taylor has worked for this. I know how deserved it is that this book now exists in the world.
The first thing you’ll notice is the style. The precision. The craft that shines from every page. I’m no technical expert in prose, and there are people better qualified than me to talk about the mechanics of what he’s doing.
What I want to talk about instead is how Trav captures the essence of lives lived in the shadow of generations of pain, with too little room to manoeuvre.
Trav is the story of a boy becoming a man with just enough wiggle room to fuck up, like everyone before him has, but not so completely that it becomes the end of him. Instead, he gets to take all of it and make something different from it. But it’s always there; he’s always at the edge and we see failures that feel familiar, weaknesses and the dire circumstances we have to accept to make a go of doing the thing we are compelled to do most.
My feeling throughout was that Trav is afforded a certain grace by the people around him, a little more patience, a little more room to be odd, and that this allowance is bought at a devastating price in the novel’s opening pages. I can almost hear it now: rooms full of people watching Trav be a little different, a little less like the other boys, saying, “Ah, bless him. He’s harmless. Poor bab.”.
One of my favourite passages in the novel is about Trav’s uncle helping to build a church. Taylor read this section at STORIE a few weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This is where you really see what he does.
His uncle grafts in a place where people come to worship that feels grand and distant and alien in many ways. Taylor builds prose with the same reverence – Taylor has always possessed the ability to not only draw you in with a story, whether in published prose or his more personal essays – but what happens each time is you come for the story and you stay for the way he tells it. Tay breaks down through the polish & convention to share stories with heart. The image of one craftsman sits in conversation with another. One working in brick and plaster, the other in language. Both making something beautiful that will outlast them.
I don’t think it’s an accident that Taylor writes so beautifully about people making things. Trav feels like a novel written by someone who understands that craft isn’t just artistic—it’s manual, stubborn. Whether it’s laying bricks or laying sentences, both ask for patience, precision and faith that what you’re making will stand.
What most impressed me about Trav was the clever narrative voice. The story is narrated in the third person by our protagonist’s childhood friend Jay.
However, I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t Trav himself telling me this story. At times the prose is interrupted by a break in voice – an interjection of Trav’s own eloquence, as though his voice is gently leaking into Jay’s. It creates tension around reliability, and I found myself narrowing my eyes more than once.
At the launch Taylor was asked if he did this to distance himself from the story – he thought, and decided that maybe he did subconsciously. I wonder, as a reader, about the opportunity this narration offers – is there an honesty that Jay’s narration affords, as opposed to Trav, in conversation with his family mythology and story? Expanding on his answer, Taylor mentioned that whole sections ‘explaining’ the narrator were cut during editing. Whoever made that decision was absolutely right. The point lands because it isn’t over-explained. It trusts the reader.
It’s probably worth mentioning the launch, too.
We both did it anyway, through all those years when it was hardest. Taylor has arrived at a moment where this book feels like an antidote to the growing homogenisation of working-class writing, the bastardisation and co-option of stories born on our estates. Stories that begin in places like ours but are often sanded down into something more palatable before they reach the page. This is something many of us are feeling the tension of in Birmingham, one that seems to be running away from us: the “bab-ification” of every cultural moment. It’s being lifted out of our arms and turned into something unrecognisable and then printed on tote bags. Through all this Taylor has become, along with a handful of excellent people, central to a growing literary scene, where class politics drive the conversation and where so many of us can relax into the work, without feeling the tension of middle class performance.
I couldn’t wait to get my copy. I know how hard Taylor has worked for this. I know how deserved it is that this book now exists in the world.
The first thing you’ll notice is the style. The precision. The craft that shines from every page. I’m no technical expert in prose, and there are people better qualified than me to talk about the mechanics of what he’s doing.
What I want to talk about instead is how Trav captures the essence of lives lived in the shadow of generations of pain, with too little room to manoeuvre.
Trav is the story of a boy becoming a man with just enough wiggle room to fuck up, like everyone before him has, but not so completely that it becomes the end of him. Instead, he gets to take all of it and make something different from it. But it’s always there; he’s always at the edge and we see failures that feel familiar, weaknesses and the dire circumstances we have to accept to make a go of doing the thing we are compelled to do most.
My feeling throughout was that Trav is afforded a certain grace by the people around him, a little more patience, a little more room to be odd, and that this allowance is bought at a devastating price in the novel’s opening pages. I can almost hear it now: rooms full of people watching Trav be a little different, a little less like the other boys, saying, “Ah, bless him. He’s harmless. Poor bab.”.
One of my favourite passages in the novel is about Trav’s uncle helping to build a church. Taylor read this section at STORIE a few weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This is where you really see what he does.
- Paddy was an obscenely gifted grafter, see. Couldn’t spell cathedral but could certainly build you one. Soon after the slashing, Paddy was away on his first proper site, learning, setting himself up for a life, laying bricks like eggs, such a natural at it that it felt biological, like it was a birthright. That apprenticeship helped produce a year of stability for Paddy, who could join and weld and take a car apart like a rifle. Who could perform the timeless stone masonry that so few grafters had the gift for. And though Paddy’s swagger wasn’t always welcome while he helped retouch a minor basilica or some somnambulant Oxford college — too often he was a booming presence in the lofty silence of their cloisters, crude and odd, at odds with the richness of things, his twanged accent endearing him only to the other lads on the job — with a bush hammer in hand, he was an ashlar master.
When he had fully given up on the graft, downed tools, trading now only in racist pub-set oratory, not allowed to see his children, on a heavy ankle tag for fighting too literally with their mother, you might’ve asked, if you’d seen Paddy then — dipping a plumb-bob like a yo-yo, or bruiting plaster across walls in smooth clean strokes — How did this man make those things? But he did, and now at night sometimes, lanky on the latest sofa he is sleeping on, an intestinal tank rolling through his stomach, threatening to turn it over, he remembers how he used to work away among ancient tracery and clerestory windows, beneath great fan-vaulted ceilings, level with the flying buttresses, contemplating his childhood with scutch-comb clamped between his teeth like a horse’s bit, like a mouthpiece, like a bone. - (Taylor Burns, Trav, pp.79-80)
His uncle grafts in a place where people come to worship that feels grand and distant and alien in many ways. Taylor builds prose with the same reverence – Taylor has always possessed the ability to not only draw you in with a story, whether in published prose or his more personal essays – but what happens each time is you come for the story and you stay for the way he tells it. Tay breaks down through the polish & convention to share stories with heart. The image of one craftsman sits in conversation with another. One working in brick and plaster, the other in language. Both making something beautiful that will outlast them.
I don’t think it’s an accident that Taylor writes so beautifully about people making things. Trav feels like a novel written by someone who understands that craft isn’t just artistic—it’s manual, stubborn. Whether it’s laying bricks or laying sentences, both ask for patience, precision and faith that what you’re making will stand.
What most impressed me about Trav was the clever narrative voice. The story is narrated in the third person by our protagonist’s childhood friend Jay.
However, I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t Trav himself telling me this story. At times the prose is interrupted by a break in voice – an interjection of Trav’s own eloquence, as though his voice is gently leaking into Jay’s. It creates tension around reliability, and I found myself narrowing my eyes more than once.
At the launch Taylor was asked if he did this to distance himself from the story – he thought, and decided that maybe he did subconsciously. I wonder, as a reader, about the opportunity this narration offers – is there an honesty that Jay’s narration affords, as opposed to Trav, in conversation with his family mythology and story? Expanding on his answer, Taylor mentioned that whole sections ‘explaining’ the narrator were cut during editing. Whoever made that decision was absolutely right. The point lands because it isn’t over-explained. It trusts the reader.
It’s probably worth mentioning the launch, too.
The launch for Trav, at the Night Owl on the 8th of July, was one of those rare evenings where a room feels genuinely proud of someone. There was something lovely about seeing so many people gathered because they believed in one person’s work — because many had watched the years it had taken to get there.
Taylor was joined in conversation by playwright Clive Judd, another Brummie reshaping the city’s literary landscape. Through Voce Books, the independent publisher and bookshop he runs alongside his wife, Maria, Clive has built something far bigger than a business. It’s become a meeting point for working-class writers, a place where people gather because they know they’ll be understood. The two so often come as a pair – Taylor and Clive – and I found myself speaking to Clive afterwards about how rare that kind of literary partnership is. Clive connects with Taylor’s work on a deeply personal level, but he also understands the politics and craft that sit beneath it. Their friendship and professional relationship mean he is able to draw something out of Taylor that few interviewers could, and we were all better off for it.
I’ve not been to many book launches, but I’m fairly sure they don’t usually have quite this much joy. It was unmistakably Birmingham. Not Birmingham™ Bab – Real Birmingham, beneath the Digbeth lights. I have a video of Taylor’s partner dancing to the best girly-pop tunes (courtesy of our finest, DJ Tom Maguire, now co-curator of STORIE), followed by the inevitable drinking, smoking, shouting across streets, and affectionate tussling. Eventually, there was a final call for shots at Subside.
On that night – after many pints, many cigs, a few rogue baby guinesses, hugs, kissed cheeks in photo booths, dances to old school R&B – I stood with people I didn’t know two years ago and felt overwhelmingly proud because, at the centre of it all was Taylor.
Pissed.
There was so much love in that room for our lad, who has, unfortunately, ruined grape juice for me forever.
Footnotes
Wondering what ground Charlotte has to stand on to write about such a book? There’s plenty! Try her Substack, her work in Derwent and Floodgate Press, or her previous work for Concrete!
If you’re convinced to get your own copy of Trav, why not get it from a Birmingham independent, like The Heath, or Voce Books? Sure beats Amazon!
If you’re still not fully convinced to pick up Trav yet, why not start with ‘Hunger’, a 30-minute piece of short fiction, up on Grass Magazine?
Taylor was in conversation with Coral McCarthy Somerville at Funny Weather Books on 23rd July. Find out more here!