The Cambridge (UK) writing scene

Writers new to Cambridge can take a while to find out what's on. Here's a list of starting points. I've mentioned web sites though often it's better to follow on social media.

• Literary Festivals - The Cambridge Literary Festival site gives news about their 2 annual festivals and some one-off events too. There are plans for a Cambridge Poetry Festival in 2026.
• Performance -
  • CB1 hosts monthly poetry open-mics, some with guest poets.
  • Cambridge Storytellers
  • The Junction hosts some spoken word events
• Bookshops - Heffers and Waterstones organise events. Secondhand bookshops like Amnesty International (Mill Road - it has a short story section which is always a good sign) and Oxfam offer interesting collections. Bodies in the Bookshop specialises in crime fiction.
• Public Libraries - readings and regular writing events
• Evening Classes and Clubs - Cambridge writers and a budding Mill Road Poetry Group
• U3A - The Cambridge U3A branch is lively.
• Cambridge University - student societies; readings; writers in residence, etc. Varsity offers some info. You can apply to browse in the University Library.
• ARU - Cambridge Writing Centre is a recent development that promotes many events
• Local periodicals/publications -
  • Cambridge Literary Review
  • Cambridge poetry
  • Students once a year produce a literary anthology - "The Mays".
• Environs - Ely has Toppings - a bookshop which runs many events. Also at Ely there is Fenspeak (open-mic and readings). At Norwich there's the National Writing Centre.

Redundancy in prose

The novels I've recently read/heard commonly have the following type of redundancy, the voice not always being one of the characters. Even when it is, I find it distracting. Me being pedantic?

• The building was triangular in shape ("It should have been me" by Susan Wilkins)
• I watched his Adam's apple rise up and down in his throat ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• He nodded to himself ("The Maidens" by Alex Michaelides)
• I thought to myself ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• I screamed out loud ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• with audible clicks ("Dark Pines" by Will Dean)
• She lets out an audible sigh ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• hitting the ground with an audible thud ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• she paled visibly ("The Hidden Beach" by Karen Swan)
• Holgate visibly winced ("The Fine Art of Invisible Detection" by Robert Goddard)

Story magazine rankings

Brecht de Poortere's Top 1000 Literary Magazines ranks literary magazines that print fiction, 1st being The New Yorker and 1126th being Witcraft. They write that "The ranking is based primarily on prizes/anthologies. For journals that do not figure in any of these anthologies, the number of Twitter followers is used for lack of a better metric." As they point out, non-US magazines score badly with that system because UK/Eire anthologies aren't included - "The Stinging Fly" is only 299th, and "Stand" isn't there at all. Nevertheless it's a useful resource - a spreadsheet, so you can download it and add your formulae.

I've only been in 1 of the top 100 magazines. Here's my complete list

The Forge Literary Magazine	87
JMWW	171
Moonpark review	236
Necessary Fiction	239
Fictive Dream	317
Worcester Review	355
Splonk	404
Brilliant Flash Fiction	416
Dribble Drabble Review	426
Full House Literary	501
Paragraph Planet	503
Unbroken	556
Ink, Sweat & Tears	595
Toasted Cheese	695
Literary Stories	716
Every Day Fiction	770
Wensum Literary Magazine	967

"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

It's a book of statements by poets about poetry. I've added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me" (John Heath-Stubbs)
• "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh)
• "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine)
• "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas)
• "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam)
• "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams)
• "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams)
• "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams)
• "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue)

Fleeting gone

The link I had to a poem in Fleeting has gone dead, so I'll reprint it here -

The Gallery Affair Then I see her, the girl of my crutched dreams - Mona Lisa smoking a pipe that's not a pipe, sipping absinthe from a fur-lined cup that tickles her moustache. We miss the train that leaves the fireplace, but anyway it's raining businessmen so we stay in, smooch to the Broadway Boogie Woogie, sleeping in this tent with en-suite Mutt urinal. We've learnt our lessons. Abstraction came too easy for Brancusi, the universe already constipated with objects. He fed his 2 white dogs lettuce floating in milk. Schiele was more realistic - he couldn't afford the paint, he said, when the judge who burnt his work in public asked why he chose models with amputated feet. Our millennium opened late for staff training. By the time we wake to Turner's blazing sunrise, it's all on video, our taut bodies reviewed as allusive symbols of when beauty was freer than porn, though the cafe's a rip-off and the Impressionists' cheap pigments are fading in the light, irreplaceable as our love, the frame and signed canvas statements in themselves.

Losing yourself

Sometimes a person retreats to a cave or a remote croft to find themselves, worried that others might influence them, that their true self will be diluted.

Some writers are rather like that, not interacting with others. If their writing's good enough for them that's all that matters. Some become famous, albeit belatedly - Emily Dickinson for example, or to a lesser extent, Hopkins. But most writers like the company of other writers, thinking that it helps their writing. Many join their local writer's groups. Some reach out further, participating in the big world of literature, thinking that the advantages of joining a local group are magnified by interacting with more people. Maybe so, but the risks are greater too - writers risk being driven by market forces and social pressure, losing their authenticity by doing anything to be published, selling themselves out.

I'm one of those people involved with bigger groups. I look upon new styles not as a betrayal of Self but as a way of exploring new aspects of it. I think some compromise is inevitable - friendships depend on it, so why not the writer-reader relationship? But if you're worried about authenticity, here are some tips on how to survive out there without selling your soul too much.

• Find out about the magazines which accept work just like yours. There are magazines specialising in "Gothic Seaside", "Funfairs", "Angels", light verse, etc.
• Don't agonise about which magazine to send a piece to. Send it to a dozen magazines at once - most little literary magazines accept (even encourage) simultaneous submissions nowadays. Mix ambitious submissions with easier, confidence-building ones. Keep lots of submissions in the post - 20 or so. If you're a novelist, write Flash too.
• Let the piece find its own level - start by sending to the New Yorker by all means, but be prepared to send it to smaller and smaller magazines if it's repeatedly rejected.
• Be prepared to re-style your pieces to suit the market or editor (just as you wear appropriate clothes to different social events). If experienced editors make suggestions, listen to them. Don't let your ego get in the way. Try different styles: a chameleon has just as authentic a Self as a toad has - Self is more than skin deep.
• Don't forget that something of value to you - a piece where you feel you've expressed your feelings clearer than ever before, perhaps - may be of no interest to those who don't know you. Though novelty for its own sake isn't likely to fool people for long, neither is submitting work too similar to what others send in. Alexander Pope's "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" still applies, but many more thoughts have been well expressed since his day, so you need to read widely, not just write.

AI

Most guidelines for literary magazines and competitions include mention of AI nowadays. It's a rather loose term (I've seen it used for computer-assisted tasks that involve OuLiPo procedures, anagram generation, or randomness) but usually people have a chatgtp-like facility in mind, the computer producing the poem.

The process can be more collaborative than that though, the human keeping control. I've heard a leading mathematician say recently that he uses chatgtp to bounce ideas off of, like chatting to someone over coffee. I use Google in rather the same way, to see what happens if (say) I search for "sheep and chess".

"AI Literary Review" is a new home for such work - "a journal of new poetry, created by humans, utilising artificial intelligence". The poets describe the process that led to their poem. See Issue 1 (Sam Riviere, Harry Man, etc).