Words on a Page

  Let me start off by saying that I love Cormac McCarthy , and at the time of his death last summer I'd read all but his last two novels, ThePassenger and Stella Maris (which at the time were only available in hardback). I love his use of archaic, biblical and inventive language as well as the demands he puts on his readers—you don’t turn to McCarthy for an easy, straightforward read. His novels deal with complex themes (Love, Death, Violence, the nature of Good and Evil, and the nature of God), and you get the sense that McCarthy, himself, is grappling for understanding of both the world he has been cast into and the worlds he has created. The Passenge r is no different—in fact, in many ways, it is even more challenging for its lack of a traditional narrative structure: a beginning, a middle and an ending. On the surface, T he Passenger feels familiar. It feels like genre fiction . When Bobby Western and a fellow salvage diver investigate a small plane that has crashed in th...

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...

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration claimed that tax breaks for corporations and the nation’s highest earners would spur economic growth and allow wealth to ‘ trickle-down ’ to those on the lower end of the economic scale. It was a lie, of course. Money doesn’t trickle down. It pools at the feet of the already wealthy. Reaganomics only led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a faster rate than before. For anyone who graduated from high school, went to university, got married, and generally came of age in the United States in the 1980s, Cris Mazza’s short story collection  Trickle-Down Timeline  brings that decade into sharp focus again.  ‘For ten or twenty years after leaving home,’ the narrator of ‘What If’   tells us, ‘there’s little nostalgia about where you came from.’ As young adults, loose upon the wider world, the hometowns we moved away from – some of us as soon as we possibly could – held little attraction. The same can be sa...

  The Portsmouth Authors Collective seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. Today’s interview is with the poet and debut novelist Tina Cathleen MacNaughton.   Author Bio: Tina Cathleen MacNaughton has written and published four books: a collection of poetry entitled On the Shoulders of Lions (The Choir Press, 2021); two children’s books, When the Elves Rescued Christmas and Santa’s Still Asleep (WriteRhymes, 2020 and 2021), and a novel with a 1980s music background Delphy Rose – the Girl Who Wrote Songs (Troubador). ~ Loree:  Welcome to my blog, Tina. And thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Every time I scroll through Facebook, lately, I see that another of your poems has been accepted for publication. What is your biggest achievement to date? Tina: Finishing and publishing my novel Delphy Rose . It was my dream to publish a novel before I was fifty. I am eight years late, but w...

  So far in this series of interviews with writers from the Portsmouth Authors Collective , I've focussed on novelists. But we also have many non-fiction writers in the Collective, and in this interview I speak with Paul Newell who has published numerous books on Portsmouth History, as well as books on a number of other historical subjects. Author Bio:  Paul was born in Portsmouth and returned after studying in London. He now works as an HR Manager. A keen genealogist, Paul has a passion for local history and in recent years has been researching the history of Portsmouth during Victorian and Edwardian times. Paul’s first publication, Shocking Tales from Victorian Portsmouth , was a huge success, and several books around these topics have followed. ~ Loree: Welcome to my blog, Paul. It’s great to have you hear. Let’s jump right in. You write historical non-fiction. How did it all start?   Paul: I was researching some family info after I found out a great grandfathe...

The Portsmouth Authors Collective  was created to promote the work of the city’s current crop of authors, and this series of interviews offers a glimpse into the work their doing and their writing lives. This time around I'm speaking the the thriller writer Christine Lawrence. Author Bio: Christine Lawrence is an ex-psychiatric nurse turned author and spoken word performer whose fiction draws on real life experiences and local settings. She was one of the BookFest 2012 ‘ Writers to Watch ’ . Since then, her shorter fiction has been featured in a variety of local anthologies and projects including  Portsmouth Fairy Tales for Grown Ups , the Writing Edward King project, the transmedia event  Cursed City Dark Tide , and  Pompey Writes: the Best of Star & Crescent . In 2021, she facilitated a series of writing workshops as part of the Libraries Connected/BBC project, ‘Novels that shaped the world’ . A creative writing tutor, she is passi...