Back from the beach

with a stack of anthologies for you to stick your beak into

Dear readers,

I must start by apologising for a very quiet month of May on this blog. The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, of course – I haven’t been on the beach (no more than normal, anyway!) – I have been dealing with an unexpected rush of urgent publishing work, in many different forms. Valley Press has been running flat-out since the start of April, and things have only properly dropped to a slower pace this afternoon.

I thought I’d ease back into the blog by talking about some of the projects I’ve been working on; then next week, I’ll reveal the winners of our most recent poetry competition, before hopefully finishing the publishing business post I’ve been tinkering with throughout this period. I also have a few pairs of authors working on interviews in the new format, so there should be plenty to read this month!

Speaking of which…

Permanent Emotion

This exciting new anthology, edited by SJ Bradley, will be launched in an event at Leeds Lit Fest on Sunday 23rd June. It is available to pre-order now exclusively through the Valley Press web shop, with a wider trade release next month.

It features graduates from the Northern Short Story Festival Academy programme, which – with generous support from the Walter Swan Trust – has been nurturing the North’s short-form writing talent since 2017. The title comes from the poem ‘Child of Thought’ by the late Walter Swan himself, also included in the book: “Child, you are my permanent emotion / Among sliding thoughts and motion.”

We’ve worked with this team a couple of times before; you may remember May You from 2018 and the award-shortlisted This New North from 2021. Permanent Emotion could be thought of as their spiritual successor, though this is the first volume to exclusively feature graduates from the Academy. All that learning has clearly paid off; it’s really great stuff, as much of a page-turner as any book you’ll pick up this year.

The cover illustration is by yours truly; one of the “digitally-assisted watercolours” that often grace these posts. I would never describe myself as an illustrator, and I’m completely hopeless in the real world with a paintbrush and water – but over the past year, producing images for this blog has helped me hone some fairly neat digital techniques, and I’ve now got to the point where the results are good enough to use on VP book covers.

This could be an exciting new design era! The only issue is, a proper illustration takes hours and hours to get right, whereas finding a neat stock image and arranging some text on it (the method I preached in my recent design post) is far quicker, easier, and more reliable. My fear is spending all day on a drawing only for the author to absolutely hate it – so we’ll see if this new initiative sticks, or not.

I completed three illustrations over the past fortnight. With the launch imminent, the one I really needed to get on top of was the Permanent Emotion cover; but I found myself endlessly staring at a blank digital canvas, wondering what on earth I could draw to represent that abstract title and the eighteen entirely different short stories within the book. So I switched to the second-most urgent challenge: creating artwork for a new postcard, to be included with all purchases through our web shop over the summer (and at the anthology launch, and this cool book fair we are exhibiting at the previous day).

Unfortunately, the pressure of the postcard (of which 500 copies would be produced) also proved a bit too much, so I was now staring at two blank canvases, lost for ideas on both fronts. The obvious solution was to start work on another illustration that needed completing, of which the subject was at least clear: the house Ralph Dartford was born in, for the cover of his forthcoming collection House Anthems, to be published late 2024. (I won’t have time to properly introduce that one today, but do follow the link to check out how the cover ended up!) Although I knew what that picture needed to show, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it – so I found myself circling back through the three projects, somehow both procrastinating on and working on all of them at once, an Escher staircase of “demand avoidance” that looped back around to being productive. (I can cautiously recommend this technique.)

The breakthrough with Permanent Emotion came when, in desperation, I pasted a photo of Leeds Town Hall’s clock tower into the middle of the virtual canvas – then gave myself permission to go a bit nuts, the digital equivalent of throwing paint everywhere. I must say, the resulting blaze of colour is a fairly accurate representation of what “emotion” looks like for me, with the building (and perhaps the book itself) representing “permanence”. I think it’s eye-catching, at the very least!

Oh, and the postcard, of course, will feature the “happy seagull on stack of beach books” picture at the top of this post – which vaguely suggests Scarborough, books, and happiness, which I eventually decided were the three concepts needed. Look out for those through your letterboxes soon, perhaps accompanied by one of the…

York St John Anthologies

Every year since 2018, we have had the privilege of publishing at least one – often two – anthologies created by the students of York St John University. With the bulk of the editing and cover design taken care of by the students themselves, my role is usually limited to typesetting, and a little polishing here and there; though due to the way the modules play out, any work on these projects needs a lightning-fast turnaround. The arrival of the York St John files during my busy period (also coinciding with two other school-related projects) really cranked things up to eleven. I must try to keep the month of May free next year – hopefully writing it down will help me remember!

Anyway, I was delighted with how this year’s YSJ publications turned out. The cover for Beyond the Walls, with its “zipped lips” illustration by Ollie Groover, is not one I would necessarily have commissioned, but it really works on the physical book; to my eyes it looks like both a punk “zine” and a serious literary anthology. I have always had a soft spot for this series, where first-year Creative Writing students select and edit the work of third-years and postgrads, who in turn worked on it when they were first-years – it’s like a generational rite of passage. I take great pleasure in putting this always fresh, never remotely cynical volume out into the world, and giving a platform to so many early-career writers in the process.

York Literary Review, as pictured above, is the “older sibling” of the two; a bona fide literary journal open to writers from all over the world, and produced by MA Publishing students who are (hopefully) about to embark on careers in the industry. Each edition has a theme, and this year’s is ‘Spirit’, inspired by York’s rich ecclesiastical and ghostly history, but also (to quote the introduction) “the spirit of our inner selves; the determination, courage, and values that we hold.” It’s a top-quality production in every sense – I’ll have to give you all a nudge next time the submissions window opens so you can take part.

In my part of the world, you can count the beacons of publishing excellence on the fingers of one hand, and York St John’s “Centre for Writing” (an umbrella for both anthologies and other activities) is definitely one of them. It’s always a delight to be involved, or support their work in any way, and I hope to be able to do so for many more years to come.

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Right, that’s all for today – time now to clear my inbox, judge the last competition, then finally get down to some serious work on my selections from last year’s submissions window, whose authors have been patiently waiting for “busy season” to pass. (Well, one of them may have organised a massive live event related to their book in July – but they haven’t been nagging me about it, so that’s still some top-quality patience.) I look forward to writing to you all again soon, and as ever, thanks for reading.