Unsound Methods

For episode 56 we're joined by Daisy Hildyard, the author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2013) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017).

Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born. Emergency was published last year by Fitzcarraldo Editions: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/emergency

This episode took us on a ride through shutting out the world during your writing time, having a spouse as your first reader, how notes come together, and the different nudges that fiction and non-fiction give you as a writer.

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month marks the fifth anniversary of Unsound Methods - thank you to everyone who's joined us along the way, and hello to any new arrivals...

In this episode we speak to Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey about the writing of their collaboratively composed novel 'Macbeth, Macbeth' (available from Boiler House Press, here: https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/macbeth-macbeth-by-ewan-fernie-simon-palfrey) 

'Macbeth, Macbeth' is described by its authors as a critical fiction. A sequel, critique, and repetition of Shakespeare’s play. Slavoj Žižek has described it as: ‘a miracle, an instant classic… as close as one can come to a quantum physics literary criticism’.

A video trailer for the book is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-seZCr3Ho

Ewan Fernie is Director of the 2-million-pound lottery-funded ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project (everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk), which is reviving the world’s first great Shakespeare library and Birmingham’s broader reputation as a pioneering modern city. It was a major influence on the Cultural Programme and the Opening Ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games. His day-job is as Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and Culture Lead for the College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham. Ewan's books include: Shame in Shakespeare, The Demonic: Literature and Experience, Shakespeare for Freedom, Spiritual Shakespeares, Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange, and New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity. For many years, he co-edited the groundbreaking ‘Shakespeare Now!’ series with Simon Palfrey. In 2018, he hosted Radical Mischief: Inviting Experiment in Theatre, Thought and Politics with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Deputy Director, Erica Whyman at The Other Place. He is now leading a new project, Serious About Comedy, with Sean Foley, Artistic Director of Birmingham REP, as well as an ambitious cross-cultural initiative with the Birmingham-based artist and curator, Mohammed Ali of Soul City Arts.  He is writing a book about the Scottish writer and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, provisionally entitled The Dirty History of Hope.

Simon Palfrey is Professor of English at Brasenose College Oxford University. His recent work explores the unique kinds of life generated by dramatic, poetic, and fictional forms, and the opportunities this opens up for more imaginative, philosophically adventurous, and politically engaged critical work. His books include Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004; 2nd ed. 2011), a TLS International Book of the Year; Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), the MRDS Book of the Year; Poor Tom: living King Lear (Chicago, 2014); Shakespeare's Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 2014) Simon’s current projects are inspired by Spenser’s Faerie Queene, including a new bestiary, A Poem Come True, and the twice AHRC-award winning Demons Land, a mixed media event (film, drama, dance, paintings, sculptures, soundscapes, text) that imagines an island built in the image of Spenser’s epic poem (demonsland.com).

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

In a slight shift from our literary fiction focus, we caught up with writer and script editor Jenny Landreth - one of the driving forces behind the brilliant children's animated TV show 'Hey Duggee'. Having both become fathers only weeks apart in the summer of 2018, Hey Duggee was one of the most joyful discoveries in the often barren wastelands of our young daughters' TV choices...

We learnt about how script editing works and how a show like Hey Duggee is put together, as well as speaking a little about Jenny's work on the upcoming reboot of the Magic Roundabout. Jenny also spoke about balancing non-fiction writing with children's TV and the feast and famine nature of freelance work.

WARNING: for those of you who might want to listen with Duggee loving children around, there is a small sprinkling of the kind of language you wouldn't hear in the Squirrels' clubhouse...

Jenny is on Twitter (although she uses it more for her personal life than professional): @jennylandreth

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

In this episode with chatted with Etgar Keret, writer of short stories, comics, a children's book and a memoir. Etgar's books have been published in fifty languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. He is currently a Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

He has received the Book Publishers Association's Platinum Prize several times, the St Petersburg Public Library's Foreign Favourite Award (2010) and the Newman Prize (2012). In 2010, he was honoured in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007, Keret and Shira Geffen won the Cannes Film Festival's "Camera d'Or" Award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers' Guild. His latest collection "Fly Already" won the most prestigious literary award in Israel, the Sapir prize (2018), as well as the National Jewish Book Award of the Jewish Book Council.

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

Our guest in this episode is Australian writer Daniel Davis Wood, author of Blood and Bone (2014) which won the Viva La Novella Prize and At the Edge of the Solid World (2020), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Our chat with Daniel covered unconventional composition techniques derived from artistic practice, the difference between writing novellas and novels, reading your work out loud and plenty more. We also briefly covered Daniel's work as a publisher with his press Splice.

The Garielle Lutz essay that Daniel references can be found here: https://culture.org/the-sentence-is-a-lonely-place/

You can find out about Daniel, his writing and his publishing via his website: https://danieldaviswood.com/

Daniel is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/DanielDavisWood

And his books (aside from At the Edge of the Solid World) are available via Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/daniel-davis-wood - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

Episode 51 with Claudia Durastanti.

This month we speak to writer and translator Claudia Durastanti. We cover the importance of travel and geography in writing, mapping fictional spaces, translation and the overlap of metaphor between languages.

Claudia is the author of Strangers I Know and Cleopatra Goes To Prison, translated to English, as well as well as Un giorno verrò a lanciare sassi alla tua finestra and A Chloe, per le ragioni sbagliate.

Claudia is on twitter here: https://twitter.com/CDurastanti

And her books are available via Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/books?keywords=claudia+durastanti - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

Hitting the half century, we speak to British-Argentine poet and journalist Miguel Cullen, author of collections including Wave Caps (2014), Paranoid Narcissism! (2017) and, most recently, Hologram (2022). Miguel's work has involved integrating sound chips and video-screens into the bound collections, raising some interesting blends of form. He has been published by Caught by the River, Abridged, Lunar Poetry, Magma Poetry, Purple Fashion Magazine and Stand. He was shortlisted for the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Award 2020.

Ambit magazine wrote about his latest book, Hologram: "Is this the first ever poetry book with a film screen? Psychedelic modernity, embracing London meets LatinX, a collage of myths in language medium and form." 
Our chat (somewhat truncated by some sound issues) covered the factors that lead to pieces becoming a collection, the confrontation between competing attitudes towards the canon (whatever that means!), what artists from other forms can bring to written work, and the potential fire risk of pushing formal boundaries.

Miguel's collections are available through Odilo Press: https://www.odilopress.com/ - Hologram is also available through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/miguel-cullen - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Miguel's website is here: https://miguelcullen.com

Miguel is also on Twitter: @MiguelCullen2

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month we speak to writer and artist Sara Baume. Sara is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), A Line Made by Walking (2017), the non-fiction handiwork (2020) and Seven Steeples, which is released this month on Tramp Press, who have published all of her work so far.

Amongst much else, we cover: living a creative life that combines writing and visual art; learning narrative from arthouse cinema; finding a form from the original idea; writing slowly; abandoning work that doesn’t feel right.

Sara's Instagram is: @saraofthebaumes

Sara's books are available directly from Tramp Press: https://tramppress.com/writer/sara-baume/ or through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/sara-baume - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

In this episode we speak to writer Richard Beard. Richard’s six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and he is the author of five works of narrative non-fiction. His memoir The Day That Went Missing won the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography and in the US was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His latest memoir/polemic is Sad Little Men.

Subjects covered include: tricking yourself into starting a writing project, how Richard's approach has changed over the course of nearly a dozen books (is 11 'a writer's dozen?'), youthful experimentation with squared paper, and knowing if the proportions of a novel feel right at the end of the first draft.

Richard has a website: https://www.richardbeard.info/

And he's on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeardRichard

Richards's books are available through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/richard-beard - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

We have loosely teamed up with the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. You can find out about the IES here: https://ies.sas.ac.uk/

In our latest episode we had a chat with novelist Sam Byers, author of Idiopathy (2013), Perfidious Albion (2018) and last year's Come Join Our Disease.

We talked about needing to write ideas down and how they eventually demand it, using a journal while writing a novel, getting the voice right before venturing too far and the vast gulf between dialogue on the page and in the real world.

Sam has a website: http://sambyers.co.uk/

Sam's books are available through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/sam-byers - or your local bricks and mortar book shop...

Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom

Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan

We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods

Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

We have loosely teamed up with the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. You can find out about the IES here: https://ies.sas.ac.uk/