Dec 31st and not only do I realise I haven’t blogged since July, but I find myself unable to post the traditional list of the year’s top ten books, films, or significant events. Far from this being the year of living listlessly, I am afraid the only tallies I can provide right now are a sad roll call of friends who have died in the last four months, and a long unscrolling moan of all the marking, household chores and writing projects that the year will now leave undone. Since September I’ve been teaching full time (though unfortunately not for full time wages), and the Christmas season, lovely and indulgent as it’s been, has seen me careening madly from tissue paper hats to stacks of undergraduate poems, essays and novel chapters. Work, especially satisfying work, does help stave off grief, and as well as staying up late to write poems in memory of novelist Irving Weinman, postcolonial scholar Bart Moore-Gilbert and translator Yuri Drobyshev (the late partner of my PhD supervisor Carol Rumens), I’ve paced myself with the marking, allowing ample time to relish my student’s talents. Teaching (and moaning about it) aside, it’s an unwritten part of the writer’s job to nurture new generations of wordsmiths, as Bart, Irving, and another late friend Lee Harwood, did so warmly for me.
I am especially pleased to be now starting the pile of submissions for Making It Strange: Writing the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Modern Gothic Novel, the first module I have solely designed and delivered in my teaching career, introducing students to (sneaky all-time book list alert) classic texts including Octavia Butler’s tentacular dystopia Dawn, Russell Hoban’s linguistic tour-de-force Riddley Walker and Monique Wittig’s avant-garde lesbian feminist call-to-arms Les Guérillères, as well as to my own ultra-zealous worldbuilding methodologies (hey kids, don’t stop at a map, why not write your world’s own wikipage!). The students’ enthusiasm has been incredibly rewarding, and reading the first two submissions, I feel tingles of pride in what they have accomplished.
Professionally, 2015 was a milestone in many respects. At Chichester, balancing out my still precarious part-time status, I was one of 14 university-wide recipients of a Research Development Award that will fund several research projects over the next two years (more on that below). I also became my department’s Equality and Diversity Champion, and have done my best in the role to support students with issues relating to access and inclusion, including learning more about autism.
I can report that one stereotype has been smashed already: reading a book on Asperger’s Syndrome I learned that two of my favourite writers, Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, are thought to have had the condition – as my own students have taught me, being on the spectrum doesn’t necessarily mean an inability to think metaphorically. On the subject of diversity, my appearances this year at four conferences, History Matters (discussing the dearth of Black British history teachers and scholars), the SOAS Spring Literature Festival (exploring Cultural Confluences), Blind Creations (celebrating the relationship between blindness and creativity) and the Muslim Institute’s Winter Gathering (which I left fully signed up as a new MI Fellow), all greatly deepened my knowledge of cultural resistance on many fronts.
Well, despite myself, the seasonal listmania seems to be taking hold . . . and as it does seem important to reflect on the year’s political events, I will just mention that I was glad to give a talk this autumn on the cultural and academic boycott of Israel at Brighton’s regular eclectic salon, The Catalyst Club, and also delighted in being a very naughty voter, paying my £3 to help get Jeremy Corbyn elected, hurrah! Rather less joyfully, I also wrote to my MP, cold-blooded Tory Simon Kirby, several times, protesting cuts to the Independent Living Allowance and the government’s plans to bomb ISIS while ignoring Syrian calls to combat the genocidal Assad regime by instituting a no fly zone over the country. I wrote to Brighton Pavilion’s Green MP Caroline Lucas about the latter issue too, and was pleased to see her later step down from Stop the War, which has so shamefully blocked Syrian voices in this urgent debate. The vote was lost, as we all know, and the war continues, toward its sixth year. It is very hard to know how to help, but I tried to do so this year by donating to Migrant Offshore Aid Station, who rescue refugees at sea, Middle East Children’s Alliance, whose Christmas appeal supported Palestinian and Syrian refugees, and the White Helmets, an unarmed volunteer force who, at huge risk to their own lives, pull people from the buildings Assad bombs.
2015 also saw the publication of Rook Song, and the launch of Astra in North America and though my lists of things to do to support both books are largely still unticked off, I will be getting back to the peculiar task of self-promotion in the New Year. For all that teaching will pay off in 2016 as I don’t go back in the classroom until September. Next semester is earmarked for research, which brings me to the happy announcement that, weaving my political, cultural and literary interests together, one of the top hats I’ll wear over the next two years will be the editorship of an anthology of Palestinian poetry in translation, forthcoming from Smokestack Books in 2017. Work will start in earnest in February when I visit Palestine to research permaculture and biodiversity in the West Bank for an article for the Nature issue of Critical Muslim. The anthology will be a mixture of established and new voices, and I am determined, if at all possible, to include Palestinian poets from Syria.
But first I have to proofread the next book in The Gaia Chronicles, and start the final novel of the quartet. . . Between teaching, writing doorstopper SFF, and trying to keep my poetry oar in, I do feel like a storm-tossed craft at times, but so far I have managed to land at most of the islands in my small archipelago. Except the one called Goodreads . . . I was heartily buoyed, though, to see Rook Song end up on an Effing Best of 2015 list, and I do still want to write about my talk for the Muslim Institute Winter Gathering, though, so the promise of a full post (plus my own blinder of a list!) on my current reading focus, Islamic SF, seems like a good note to end on – along with my best wishes to you all for smooth sailing and admiral adventures in 2016.
