James McDermott – författare

Adventurous and willful, the swashbuckling Martin Frobisher was both a brave sea-commander who served Elizabeth I with distinction and a privateer who single-mindedly pursued his own interests. This highly entertaining biography provides the first complete picture of the life and exploits of Frobisher—from his voyages in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to his courageous resistance to the Spanish Armada and his exploits as privateer and sometime pirate. The book explores Frobisher’s vigorous personality and its manifestation in the turbulence of his career and his impact on others. It also illuminates the robust world of maritime enterprise in England in the sixteenth century, when the shifting objectives of the Elizabethan age brought together felons, merchants, and great officers of state.James McDermott, a leading authority on Martin Frobisher and the Northwest Passage, offers a riveting account of the explorer, based on all extant manuscript and documentary sources. McDermott sets aside the distortions of Frobisher’s popular reputation as a hero and offers instead a richly detailed portrait of a fascinating but flawed man whose ceaseless search for wealth and fame defined his extraordinary life.

The Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1603 was, to most contemporary Englishmen, a conflict for the soul of the nation. To their descendants, the Armada campaign of 1588 represented a watershed in European history that both preserved English freedoms and halted the momentum of an ambitious and alien empire. Yet the victorious nation had contributed much to the conflict. This book examines the process by which the Spaniard, a long-term ally and friend, became in English eyes the epitome of human depravity, and how resistance to his imagined goals helped shape an emerging sense of nationhood.The antipathies generated by this process ensured that the Armada campaign was a battle for different ideals of civilization. The protagonists expected the clash to be decisive, but what ensued was no heroic encounter. Instead it was an inconclusive affair, redeemed—for England—by atrocious weather and poor Spanish understanding of the coastlines of western Scotland and Ireland.

"Norfolk's bootiful. Miles of coastline, endless sea, endless sky. So much space to dream big dreams. But... yeah: there's nowhere round here to make those dreams come true".May runs a crumbling caff on the end of Cromer Pier. Her delivery man Ken is losing customers to Costa. Her head waiter Nemo is desperate to leave Norfolk and tread the boards in London. Nemo's unrequited love Daz is burying his head in the sand over his best mate leaving.Time and Tide is an LGBTQ themed comedy drama about a Norfolk community struggling with change.The play was long-listed for The Bruntwood, Papatango and Verity Bargate Playwriting Prizes and was developed on Park Theatre's Script Accelerator Programme 2018 before having its world premiere at Park Theatre in February 2020.

'Where can I 'explore' by the coast? Rock pools. I can't get onto Grindr and Tinder: there's no 4G in Norfolk. The whole world is a singles bar now but I can't get in. I am sick of feeling like a story that will never get told.'Jimmy is sixteen, sexually confused and stuck in the seaside town they forgot to bomb. He's screwed. Well he isn't actually: that's the problem... When pop icon Morrissey comes to London, Jimmy flees to the big city to find his hero and himself.Rubber Ring is a coming of age comedy solo play about growing up queer in a rural community, learning to love yourself, love your roots and love without labels.

Military Service Tribunals were formed following the introduction of conscription in January 1916, to consider applications for exemption from military service. Swiftly, they gained two opposing yet equally unflattering reputations. In the eyes of the military, they were soft, obstructionist ‘old duffers’. To most of the men who came before them, they were the unfeeling civilian arm of a remorseless grinding machine.This work, utilising a rare surviving set of Tribunal records, challenges both perspectives. Wielding unprecedented power yet acutely sensitive to the contradictions inherent in their task, the Tribunals were obliged, often at a conveyer belt’s pace, to make decisions that often determined the fate of men. That some of these decisions were capricious or even wrong is indisputable; the sparse historiography of the Tribunals has too often focused upon the idiosyncratic example while ignoring the wider, impact of imprecise legislation, government hand-washing and short-term military exigencies.

Manatomy is a collection of wry, witty and cheeky poems exploring how nature, nurture, pop culture, prejudice and politics shape the identity of camp gay man James McDermott.Structured in three parts – ‘Boy’, ‘Youth’ and ‘Man’ – Manatomy interrogates how the experiences of growing up gay in a homophobic world and in rural millennial England affect a gay man’s relationships with himself, his partners, the LGBTQ+ community and the wider world.

Have you ever watched a movie or a play and wished you could see your imagination come alive like that?This is a book for aspiring playwrights, Hollywood hopefuls, and anyone with a story to tell. Whether you're a seasoned writer or a complete novice, James McDermott will demystify the secrets of crafting compelling dialogue, building unforgettable characters, and constructing scenes that leave audiences on the edge of their seats. From brainstorming ideas to polishing the final draft, you will find practical tips, inspiring anecdotes, and step-by-step guidance to see how you can make your stories come to life. James also shares insight into everything from securing an agent to self-promotion, freelancing to handling failure.Unleash your creativity, conquer the blank page, and join the ranks of storytellers who dared to dream. This is the go-to guide for everyone with a tale to tell.

Wild Life by James McDermott explores the nature of queerness, the queerness of nature, and the queerness of ‘natural’ masculinity. In bold poems that root themselves firmly in the coastal landscapes of North Norfolk, a vivid and radical dialogue between nature, sexuality and self-discovery emerges. McDermott brings a lyrical physicality to poetry which focuses on the body, desire, shame, and tenderness, creation and re-creation, and where there is ‘everything always opening / everything always coming out’. These poems skilfully graft and touch, draw parallels between moments of transformation in the many kinds of ecosystems we exist in – whether outside and between woodland, shoreline and skyline, where the wildlife will ‘see me as just another animal’, or in human interactions in schools, gyms, and pubs where ideas of manhood, self, and society’s expectations collide. Like the coastal spaces where McDermott finds an innate connection, Wild Life identifies that which is fluid and constantly changing – and that nature itself isn’t afraid of being colourful, excessive, too much.

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In* Father Myself*, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2015, held in Copenhagen, Spain, in April 2015 co-located with the Evo 2015 events, EvoCOP, Evo MUSART and Evo Applications. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected form 36 submissions. The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of research in the field. Thus, we see topics as diverse as semantic methods, recursive programs, grammatical methods, coevolution, Cartesian GP, feature selection, initialisation procedures, ensemble methods and search objectives; and applications including text processing, cryptography, numerical modelling, software parallelisation, creation and optimisation of circuits, multi-class classification, scheduling and artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the19th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2016, held in Porto,Portugal, in March/April 2016 co-located with the Evo*2016 events: EvoCOP,EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications.The 11 revised full papers presented togetherwith 8 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions.The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of researchin the field. Thus, we see topics as diverse as semantic methods, recursiveprograms, grammatical methods, coevolution, Cartesian GP, feature selection,metaheuristics, evolvability, and fitness predictors; and applicationsincluding image processing, one-class classification, SQL injection attacks,numerical modelling, streaming data classification, creation and optimisationof circuits, multi-class classification, scheduling in manufacturing andwireless networks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2017, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2017, co-located with the Evo* 2017 events, EvoCOP,  EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications.The 14 revised full papers presented together with 8 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The wide range of topics in this volume reflects the current state of research in the field. Thus, we see topics  and applications including program synthesis, genetic improvement, grammatical representations, self-adaptation, multi-objective optimisation, program semantics, search landscapes, mathematical programming, games, operations research, networks, evolvable hardware, and program synthesis benchmarks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design, EvoMUSART 2013, held in Vienna, Austria, in March 2013, colocated with the Evo* 2013 events EuroGP, EvoCOP, EvoBIO, and EvoApplications. The 11 revised full papers and 5 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. They cover a wide range of topics and application areas, including: generative approaches to music, graphics, game content, and narrative; robot gait creation; music information retrieval; computational aesthetics; the mechanics of interactive evolutionary computation; and the art theory of evolutionary computation.