Julia Bell – författare

A fully updated comprehensive guide for improving and practicing your creative writing, including contributions from Ali Smith and Kit de Waal The Creative Writing Coursebook, edited by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs, takes aspiring writers through three stages of essential practice: Gathering – getting started, learning how to keep notes, making observations and using memory; Shaping – looking at structure, point of view, character and setting; and Finishing – being your own critic, joining workshops and finding publishers.Fully updated and including a foreword by Marina Warner and contributions from forty-four authors such as Kit de Waal and Amy Liptrot, this is the perfect book for people who are just starting to write as well as for those who want some help honing work already completed. Filled with a wealth of exercises and activities, it will inspire budding writers to develop and hone their skills. Whether writing for publication, in a group or just for pleasure this comprehensive guide is for anyone who is ready to put pen to paper.

‘I loved it’ KIT DE WAAL, author of The Best of Everything‘Generous, intelligent, full of wisdom and insight’ LILY DUNN, author of Sins of My Father*A transformative guide to creative writing and the power of paying attention.The way we use language to tell stories reveals a lot about who we are and what matters to us. In Between the Lines, Julia Bell draws on almost thirty years of teaching to take us inside the writing workshop, where students from all over the world meet to share and discuss their work. She finds that in this space a kind of alchemy occurs, where paying real attention to one another and what we have to say – the ultimate challenge in our atomised, ‘always-on’ society – becomes a profound emotional education. Weaving philosophy, psychology and politics together with stories from the workshop, and featuring wise, practical advice on how to go about writing, this generous and thought-provoking book is about the transformative practice of noticing and slowing down. It shows how bad writing teaches us good things, how creativity helps us to see and be seen, and how reading and writing together fosters connection, tolerance, more expansive ways of thinking, richer access to language, new perspectives – and a better understanding of ourselves and others.*‘What appears to be a guide to creative writing is actually a brilliant manual for how to exist in groups, to handle painful material, to grow together. Could anything be more necessary or inspiring?’ Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time

'Ten minutes to midnight!' Jonathan shouts over the sound of the blazing fire. Sparks rise into the sky and mingle with the stars. 'Only ten minutes!' Bevins says, falling down on his knees. 'So it begins.' Rebekah has lived on the island her whole life, and it's only now that she's starting to wonder what she might experience outside her strict religious community. Alex has been sent to the island to escape her dark past, and through her eyes it's a dark and sinister place. Thrown together by chance, Rebekah and Alex strike up an unlikely friendship and it's together that they attempt to break free of their worlds and make a world of their own. But when a kiss between the girls is witnessed by an islander there is no escape they can make - the Rapture is coming for them all.

The anthology will be published in May 2023, just ahead of Pride. Containing 30 stories, non-fiction pieces, flash fiction and poetry, the winning entries from an international competition to capture the best of Queer writing today. Entry is open to anyone, without restriction. Submissions will open on 15th August and close on 1st October 2022. Winning authors will be notified in November 2022.

Mainstream brings thirty authors in from the margins to occupy centre-page. Queer storytellers. Working class wordsmiths. Chroniclers of colour. Writers whose life experiences give unique perspectives on universal challenges, whose voices must be heard. And read.‘In these locked down and unfocused times the short story is a much needed respite from the current Covid-19 bleakness. With Mainstream, Inkandescent has gathered together a wonderful collection of fascinating and eclectic stories. Sad, funny, horrifying and demystifying, the unique voices within take us on an open minded journey around the world. Loved it.’ — KATHY BURKE‘A riveting collection of stories, deftly articulated. Every voice entirely captivating: page to page, tale to tale. These are stories told with real heart from writers emerging from the margins in style.’ — ASHLEY HICKSON-LOVENCE, author of The 392 and Your ShowEmerging writers are placed alongside established authors. Contributors are: Aisha Phoenix, Alex Hopkins, Bidisha, Chris Simpson, DJ Connell, Elizabeth Baines, Gaylene Gould, Giselle Leeb, Golnoosh Nour, Hedy Hume, Iqbal Hussain, Jonathan Kemp, Julia Bell, Juliet Jacques, Justin David, Kathy Hoyle, Keith Jarrett, Kerry Hudson, Kit de Waal, Lisa Goldman, Lui Sit, Nathan Evans, Neil Bartlett, Neil Lawrence, Neil McKenna, Ollie Charles, Padrika Tarrant, Paul McVeigh, Philip Ridley, Polis Loizou.

Late in the 1960s, before Bell was born, her father and mother visited Aberaeron, a small fishing town on the west coast of Wales. Here, her father heard a voice - which he knew to be God - directing him to minister to the Welsh. Six months after she was born in the early 1970s, they moved to Aberaeron where he took up his first curateship. Over the next eighteen years they would move to various parishes within a forty mile radius: first to Llangeler a predominantly Welsh-speaking parish in the Teifi valley, then back to Aberaeron where Bell's father became vicar, and then to a larger and more Evangelical church in Aberystwyth.This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it's how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story. Of an English family on a mission from God, of signs and wonders in the Welsh countryside, of difference, and of faith and its loss.

An essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction. Attention pays. In today's online economy it has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world's fastest growing industry. In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?