On Saturday I attended the 60th anniversary celebration of
Stand Magazine at Leeds University. The origins of Stand are legendary. As current Managing Editor Jon Glover related, Stand was started by the now sadly deceased poet Jon Silkin in 1952, when he used his £5.00 severance pay as a lavatory cleaner to buy paper from the company office, and printed off the first copies on a mimeograph. He had been trying unsuccessfully to start a union, and instead Stand became his act of protest: to make a stand for things that matter through poetry. At a forum on small presses which I attended in the morning, Jon Glover held up copies of the first three issues for us to see: home-made looking objects, far removed from the classically designed publication Stand became. But very quickly it achieved a prodigious reputation, with huge names - including Angela Carter and Peter Carey - beginning their writing careers between its pages. It is one of the few important magazines to have survived from that time. Also legendary are Silkin's efforts in distributing the magazine: Jon Glover and poet Jeffrey Wainwright, who were later students at Leeds, related how they would come into the students' refectory to find Silkin flogging copies, and Lorna Tracy, who became his fiction editor, told how they would travel the length and breadth of the country by car with the magazine.
I was delighted that Lorna Tracy was present at the celebration. As I said when I read in the afternoon, I have felt very nurtured by Stand - as a new writer I drank in its contents, and it was a huge part of my creative education - and by Lorna in particular. When I first began writing short stories my great aim was to get a story in Stand; Lorna turned down the first story I sent her, but she was so very helpful, discussing my story in detail, and so very encouraging. As I said to her, it's people like her who make writers. Lorna eventually stepped down from Stand but returned in 2004 to edit a special fiction edition, and I was thrilled that she included my story, 'A Glossary of Bread' (now included in
Balancing on the Edge of the World). This is a story I've never read at a reading, as it's interspersed with dictionary definitions of bread and types of bread, and I didn't think it could work read out loud. But it seemed so fitting to read it on this occasion, that I had a go, and, after all, it seemed to work fine!
Others reading prose with me with were Janette Jenkins, Elanor Dymott, Elizabeth Cook and my fellow Salt author David Gaffney. Later we heard readings from poets Alison Brackenbury, Julian Turner, Vahni Capildeo and Ian Fairley. Unfortunately I then had to leave and was very sorry to miss a further two sessions of poetry readings, including those from John Cassidy, Amanda Dalton, and a trio of Ians - Gregson, Samson and Duhig.
I do urge you to subscribe to Stand if you don't already. You won't be disappointed - eclectic but excellent poetry and prose. I'm very pleased to say that my new story, 'The Relentless Pull of Gravity', originally scheduled to be included in a 2014 issue, has now been brought forward and will appear in the next issue, due out at the end of September or the beginning of October.
I'm delighted that another of my stories is to be published in the online magazine, East of the Web. If you don't already know East of the Web I recommend that you pay a visit: it's a fount of stories. Everything they've ever published is there online, easily accessible, and there's an amazing variety, something to suit every taste, while the standard is consistently high. It's definitely a place one is proud to place a story. I've got two stories proudly on there already: 'Compass and Torch' and 'A Glossary of Bread' (both now collected in Balancing on the Edge of the World). They were both stories I'd previously found hard to place: I think the problem with 'Glossary' was that it's a bit off the wall in its form (it's structured around definitions of bread), but I'm not quite sure what the problem was with 'Compass and Torch' which I see as a pretty traditional piece. In any case, East of the Web believed in them both, different as they are, and were vindicated: 'Glossary' was afterwards published again in the prestigious lit mag Stand, and 'Compass and Torch' was picked off the site for an English school textbook, and by the AQA examining board, whose GCSE syllabus it ended up on. That's how significant East of the Web is. Among the most recent publications there is a story by Ailsa Cox, my one-time co-editor on Metropolitan short-story magazine.
