Words on a Page

Richard Salsbury is a novelist and award-winning short story writer based in the south of England. His work has appeared in   Artificium ,   Flash Fiction Magazine ,   World Wide Writers ,   Portsmouth News , the   FairlightBooks   website and on BBC Radio. He is an editor and website designer for environmental writing project   Pens of the Earth . He also plays the guitar and brews his own beer. Loree: Richard, welcome back to my blog, and congratulations on the publication of your second novel. Richard: Thank you. It’s good to be back. Loree: Both of your books deal with some pretty weighty subjects – Mute was all about threats posed by Big Tech and toxic masculinity. And Gifts of Anger is about … what exactly? Extrajudicial justice? Or possibly a comment on the criminal justice system? Richard: I would say it’s about the difference between legality and morality. The desire to do something significant in a world where power is vested in the few....

The past few months have been filled with activities revolving around the Portsmouth Authors Collective - all of which have have required lots of time and energy and organisation - things that are in short supply in my world. Hence, it 's been a shameful length of time since I posted my last author interview.   Forgive me. * The Portsmouth Authors Collective   seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in and/or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. I was thrilled, therefore, to be asked to interview Richard Salsbury a couple of months ago at the launch of his debut novel Mute . Here, we reprise that interview for this blog and for the PAC website .    Author Bio: Richard Salsbury is a novelist and award-winning short story writer based in the south of England. His work has appeared in Artificium , Flash Fiction Magazine , World Wide Writers , Portsmouth News , the FairlightBooks website and on BBC Radio. He is an editor and websit...

Douglas Bruton’s latest novella is as stunning as his last – the wonderful Blue Postcards , also published by Fairlight Books . Like the earlier novella, With or Without Angels glisten’s with finely-wrought prose. But there are other similarities, too: a contemplative aging protagonist attempting to untangle memory from illusion; a fragmentary structure; and use of real artists as inspiration. In Blue Postcards , one of the storylines follows the enigmatic artist Yves Klein, and according to the author’s acknowledgements, With or Without Angels was inspired by the Scottish artist Alan Smith . The unnamed protagonist, an artist himself, draws inspiration (as did Smith) from the 18 th century Venetian painter GiandomenicoTiepolo ’s painting Il Mondo Nuovo ‘The New World’. No longer able to paint, but still with ‘too many thoughts in his head’ the artist takes a young assistant, Livvy, to help him express his artistic vision. As his hands have become unsteady, he has swapped his...

  Photo credit:  Amanda Slater  cc 2009 It's Sunday morning, and still the August Bank Holiday weekend. Jenny has spent the night at a B&B on the western edge of the Isle of Wight. She has just one more day to find Deborah, but is there, perhaps, something else she's looking for as well? ~ The old road from The Needles to Freshwater Bay rolls along in waves as if the land were a solid sea, cresting and falling with a frozen tide. The sea, itself, has turned a steely grey, whitecaps punctuating its surface as it churns in the wind. As she joins the A3055 again, following along the southern coast, she catches glimpses of the chalk cliffs crumbling into the waves. The whole island, it seems, is being consumed by the sea. She keeps to the edge of the road, squeezed between the grassy verge and the last of the summer holiday traffic. Now and then, as she climbs the long hill to the top of Military Road, moving slowly in her lowest gear, cars grow impatient and push past to...

Since Missing Words  was launched in the UK last summer, time has sped by, with book signings, interviews, and plans to take part in a number of presentations and discussion panels including three events at this year's  Portsmouth BookFest .  And now we have the American release to celebrate. To mark the occasion of Missing Words  heading across the pond, I've teamed up with fellow Fairlight Books author Debbi Voisey for a virtual book launch. Debbi's beautiful novella Only About Love  will be published there on the same day. Please join us on Saturday February 26th 2 p.m. - Pacific Time 3 p.m. - Mountain Time 4 p.m. - Central Time 5 p.m. - Eastern Time 6 p.m. - Atlantic Time 6:30 p.m. - Newfoundland Time 10 p.m. - UK If you're on Facebook, please follow this link to say you're coming or to register your interest, and we'll send you a reminder and Zoom link at the end of the week: Virtual Book Launch . If you're not on Facebook, please send me a message and ...

Could he pull it off? This relationship thing? He could see the future stretching out before him like a never-ending ribbon of time and he wondered, for the first time, if he could navigate it and make it to the end, and be happy along the way. Frank is the seemingly confident front man in a local rock-n-roll band, but when he meets his future wife, Liz, he is momentarily disarmed. Something about her is different from the groupies who clamber around him at the end of his gigs. When things begin to look serious, Liz puts her foot down. She won’t put up with any nonsense, she tells him. He’s going to have to behave. In chapters that move back and forth in time, Debbi Voisey’s beautiful novella gives us snapshots of Frank throughout his life: as he will be, as he was, and as he is now. In quick succession, we see him at the end of his life – confused and infirm, followed by images of him as a much younger man – vital and charismatic. We see him as a loving father to two young child...

I’m pleased to announce that Missing Words was published yesterday, and last night it was sent into the world with a fabulous (if virtual) book launch, hosted by Emma Timpany, author of the award-winning novella Travelling in the Dark . All four of the authors published this summer by Fairlight Moderns took part in the event, reading from their books and answering questions. Covid has changed a lot of things, and book launches are one of them. But you know what? Having an online launch was okay. In fact, it was better than okay. Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not a schmoozer. I hate crowds, and I hate social events where I’m expected to ‘mingle’ and make small talk. Worse yet, is talking about my book (note to self: I really must get over that). So last night’s virtual event came as something of a relief. Sure, I had to provide my own champagne, but I was very happy to stay home where my internet could unexpected go down if I started to panic. But the main thing that made the...

None of these stories are to be trusted, for they are stories of the dead told by the living and the living always lie. Leafing through a box of postcards at a Parisian market stall, the narrator of Douglas Bruton’s exquisite novella finds a distinctive blue postcard which he recognises at once. The colour is International Klein Blue (IKB), created by the avant-garde artist Yves Klein, and the postcard is an invitation to a 1957 exhibition of his monochrome paintings. Such a seemingly simple postcard, but within it is a marvellously intricate meditation about the way memory reshapes itself over time and how truth is often found in fiction. Bruton weaves together three fragmented narratives to create a story filled with passions that are never fully realised: that of the narrator, and his fascination both with Yves Klein and the colour blue; the lonely tailor, Henri, who sews a string of twisted blue Tekhelet threads into a seam in every suit he makes to bring the wearer luck; and Yves ...

  After my interview with Fairlight Books author, Douglas Bruton , discussing his latest publication, Blue Postcards , and his approach to writing, he turned the tables on me and posed some questions of his own. Here, we continue our discussing about reading, writing, and my literary novella, MissingWords , which will be published on 5 th August. ~ Douglas:   I tried writing in my teens and then again at university – nothing I wrote was worth the ink. It was not until I got a computer (aged thirty) that I found a way to write that worked. When did you know you could write and that it was something you wanted to do? Loree:   I remember dreaming up stories a lot when I was a kid. I’m an only child, and spent a lot of time entertaining myself. I know that I wanted to be a writer long before I ever wrote anything down on paper. In that way, I think I was very typical of a lot of the students I’ve worked with who want to write, but don’t yet have the tools to do so. I...