A Conversation with Susan Beale

Susan Beale was raised on Cape Cod, lived in Belgium and France, and now lives in the Wells, Somerset. Susan has worked as a journalist and editor in the US and Europe. She is a former competitive figure skater. She is a recent graduate of the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing.

The Good Guy is her first novel.

'Extremely well-written, intelligent and perceptive, this also happens to be a novel that slips down like ice-cream on a hot day. I absolutely loved it' — Shiny New Books

Ted, a car-tyre salesman in 1960s suburban New England, is a dreamer who craves admiration. His wife Abigail longs for a life of the mind. Single-girl Penny just wants to be loved. After a chance encounter, Ted becomes enamoured with Penny and begins inventing a whole new life with her at its centre. But when this fantasy collides with reality, the fallout threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear. The Good Guy is a deeply compelling debut about love, marriage, the pressure to conform, and what happens when good intentions and self-deception are taken to extremes.

The Good Guy is inspired by Susan’s life. Susan was adopted as a baby and only reconnected with her birth mother several years ago. The inspiration for the book came from her adoption files. The papers include interviews with her mother, grandmother and one with her birth father. As well as helping Susan understand why she was adopted, the papers paint a portrait of America on the cusp of the sexual revolution. It’s a time of unprecedented prosperity and conformity. Young people enjoy new freedoms, but gender roles remain clearly defined and expectations of morality and purity are strictly, and sometimes cruelly, enforced. It’s a world about to be shaken to its core.

This is an extremely evocate, powerful and well-written novel that has truly captured the essence of 1960s suburban, New England. It's been an absolute joy to feature Susan's debut novel and we'd like to thank her for taking part in A Conversation...


Tell us of your journey as a writer

I always wanted to write fiction but I didn’t think I was smart enough, or talented enough. I became a journalist after university because it was a trade not an art. I wrote fiction on the side. Terrible fiction, that further convinced me I lacked the necessary goods. Journalism was a good fit for me and I probably would have continued with it forever, but when my kids were young, the combined demands of work and family pushed me to the breaking point. My son’s sock got misplaced at day care, one day, and my life unravelled. I simply didn’t have the spare five minutes it took for them to find it. I took a work break that ended up lasting fifteen years. When it was time to think about returning to work, the industry was severely disrupted by market forces and any contacts I’d had were long gone. There was no reason not to go for the moonshot of writing fiction. I’d kept at it over the years, and noticed glimmers of improvement. I took some courses and got better still. Four years ago, my family and I moved from Brussels to Somerset and I got the chance to do the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa. That’s where I wrote the first draft of my novel, The Good Guy.

How do you see your role as a writer and what do you like most about it?

I see the role of any writer as being a truth teller, not necessarily about facts and events, but about human nature and what it feels like to be alive. What fiction offers, that nothing else can, is a chance to step into another person’s skin, to see their thoughts, unfiltered. We get to understand their emotional baggage, their prejudices, beliefs, and misconceptions. As writers, we get to dream up whole people and decide their fates. It’s like playing God. What’s not to like?

Have you ever created a character who you dislike but find yourself empathising with?

All the time. I think having empathy is a key requirement for a writer. Society has a tendency to assume that people who do terrible things are unfeeling monsters, but very few actually meet that definition. Even Hitler loved children, and doted on his dog. Besides, a purely evil person makes for a one-dimensional character, the answer to every probing question being: ‘because he/she is evil.’ Human beings are an incredibly complex species, full of passions, desires, and contradictions that must be balanced against the wants and needs of those we love. We try to choose our own paths, but circumstances bump us in directions we don’t necessarily want to go in. Life demands that we make choices, some of which we’re bound to regret, so we have to find a way to manage that, too. The individual struggle is what makes a story.

Last year, GW organised #diverseauthorday. What has been your experience of writing about diverse characters?

For me, that’s every character because every person on the planet faces his/her own unique challenges and struggles, with his/her own sets of gifts and curses. We’re all striving to fulfil a goal, deliver on a promise.

I do see part of my mission as a writer as giving voice to groups that have been historically marginalised by society. In The Good Guy, that’s unwed mothers in 1960s America. These young women were forced into hiding, shamed into silence, and then airbrushed from the picture. When they were mentioned at all, they were generally characterised as uncaring, unfit and deviant.

As is probably true of all stories about America, The Good Guy has race issues woven into its fabric. It opens in 1964, when congress was passing of the Civil Rights Acts. It’s set in New England, which thinks of itself as superior to the south on issues regarding race. Relatively speaking, I guess, it was, but only because the south set the bar so damn low. One of the main characters, Abigail, causes a stir at a cocktail party when she says blacks ought to be able to live in their tract housing community. For her, it’s basic principle. She loves American history and takes the Declaration of Independence literally: ALL men are created equal. In her mind, only an ignoramus could think differently. At the end of the book, racial tensions are on the rise as Boston begins court-ordered busing to end de-facto segregation of schools and whites are fleeing to the suburbs.

If you could be transported instantly, anywhere in the world, where would you most like to spend your time writing? And why? 

My idea of paradise is a small place, close enough to the shore to see, hear, and walk to the ocean, but far enough away so that I don’t have to worry about getting washed out to sea in a hurricane. If I’m actually going to get some writing done, the place ought not to have wifi or internet access. I can scan news websites until my eyeballs melt. Every time one of my favourite newspapers or magazines puts up a paywall, I feel a little bit relieved – one less distraction – and yet I always manage to find more sites.

What is the one book you wish you had written?

Anne Tyler’s Digging to America. Its themes of adoption and culture shock resonate with me, since I’m both an adoptee and an American who’s lived much of my adult life in Europe (the UK, France and Belgium). The multiple points of view – almost every one of the main characters gets a turn as narrator – are a testament to her skills as a writer. Each voice is authentic and unique and each character looks different depending on whether they’re being viewed from the outside or the inside. Events look different depending on who’s speaking about them and, remarkably, every version seems equally valid. The book’s structure helps drive home the over-arching theme of foreignness – of being on the outside looking in. Tyler understands what it is to be human, and can describe it with awe-inspiring understatement. In one scene, a recently widowed man tries to organise a spare room, only to end up making more of a mess. He sits on the floor saying, ‘What’s the point? What’s the point? What’s the point?’: it’s a perfect distillation of grief.

What advice do you have for would be novelists?

To read and write relentlessly and to embrace failure. Fail big, fail often, fail audaciously until, one day, you fail at failing.

What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to reading?

I’m exploring the themes of loss and a sudden change of circumstance.

Who is your favourite literary character from childhood and why?

Lizzy Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. I love her wit, her pert comments, as Caroline Bingley would say, her joy at the absurdity of human nature; most of all, I love that she isn’t perfect and that by the end of the novel she is a big enough person to recognise and acknowledge her own faults.


The Good Guy is published by John Murray.

Thank you to John Murray for the review copy.

Book Reviewer Wanted

Greenacre Writers are looking for a book reviewer. 

GW run various writing workshops, retreats and a festival throughout the year and launched the first Greenacre Writers Short Story Competition in 2011.

We held the first Greenacre Writers Mini Literary Festival in May 2012. The following year we held a 2 day event with an Open Mic as well as invited guests. In 2014 we changed the name to the Finchley Literary Festival reflecting involvement of more people in the local writing community, and a larger festival was organised courtesy of additional funding.

On our blogspot you will find announcements of our latest events, writerly posts and the very popular, A Conversation with.... And now we'd like to add more book reviews. If you love reading and can write a decent book review, get in touch.

Email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

A Conversation with Susmita Bhattacharya

Susmita Bhattacharya is from Mumbai, India. Her debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian), was published in March 2015. She is the winner of the Winchester Writers’ Festival Memoir competition 2016, and her writing has appeared in several magazines and journals in the UK and internationally including Structo, The Lonely Crowd, Litro, Wasafiri, The Bangalore Review, ElevenEleven (USA), Mslexia, Commonwealth Writers, Tears in the Fence, and on BBC Radio 4. She has recently moved to Winchester from Plymouth, where she taught English and hosted creative writing workshops. She is an Associated Lecturer at Winchester University.

Her novel The Normal State of Mind deals with difficult subject matter such as the illegality of homosexuality as well as life in contemporary India. 

It's the end of a millennium. India has made tremendous progress in science and technology, but in these times of economic boom can a friendship between two women give them the power to defy society, and law, to reach for their dreams?

Dipali, a young bride, is determined to make her marriage a success story. But her plans are cut short when her husband is killed by a bomb blast in Mumbai. Forced into a life of widowhood, her brother expects her to sacrifice her own independence for the sake of caring for her elderly mother but Dipali has other ideas.

Moushumi, a school teacher, discovers that her attraction to women is not just a girl crush. As her parents discuss potential husbands, Moushumi escapes to her high-flying lover. But how long can she keep being a lesbian secret beyond the safe walls of glamorous art crowd parties?

In the midst of communal riots and gay rights movements, India too has to make her own decisions about which traditions she must keep, and which she ought to let go. At the end of it all, who can decide what is the normal state of mind?

You can read more about Susmita's writing via her blog, Her Writing Life.

We thank Susmita for participating in our Conversation and wish her every success with her new novel and look forward to seeing more of her writing in the future.


Tell us of your journey as a writer

I remember always writing as a child. I had an old diary, and a green ink pen. I wrote poetry in green ink, because I believed that’s what gave it credibility. I must have been 7 or 8 then. I wrote adventure stories, in the style of Enid Blyton and illustrated them in old school notebooks in the summer holidays. I was very lucky, my English teacher in school was a wonderful lady, who recognised my potential and encouraged me to keep writing and improve my skill. She taught us how to read, really read a text, appreciate it, learn from it, develop our own style of writing.

After school, I didn’t write much. I went to art college, and then worked as a graphic designer. I wrote the occasional short story, but it was only after I got married and joined my husband at sea, as he was in the merchant navy, that I had all this time to actually write. I wrote letters, journals, stories, about my travels, my experiences, and a few novels were even attempted.

It’s only after he left his sea career and we moved to Cardiff in 2004, that I realised creative writing is actually an academic subject. I was new to the UK, didn’t have a job, and wanted to enrol in some courses at the university. The Lifelong Learning department had a few Creative Writing courses, and I signed up for one. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. The tutor was an absolute inspiration, she encouraged me to better my writing, and eventually suggested I do the MA in Creative Writing. I started taking my writing seriously then and embarked on a long, long journey writing my first novel. After ten years, it was finally published by Parthian last year.

How do you see your role as a writer and what do you like most about it?

I write because I enjoy writing. But I know that I also want to use my experience as a writer to be able to enthuse young people to write, and read. I enjoy hosting workshops and working with people from all sorts of backgrounds, be it school children, refugees, cancer patients, anyone with a love for writing. I also want to write about themes close to my heart, and because I love reading books set in different countries and cultures, I want to add my own books to the list of diverse books for people to read!

Have you ever created a character who you dislike but find yourself empathising with?

Hmmm interesting question. I wrote a short story about a woman who was badly bullied in school, but grew up to be a successful career woman. She bumps into the girl who bullied her at school, who is now not having a very good life. It made an interesting meeting, and conversations, where I began to feel sorry for the bully, and didn’t really take to the successful woman, who with her sense of superiority started giving the other woman a hard time.

Last year, GW organised #diverseauthorday. What has been your experience of writing about diverse characters?

Since I am a ‘diverse’ author, my characters have been diverse, which means they are not diverse to me, in that sense of the word. For me, diverse is writing about a white person living in the West. I was very nervous to write about them because I felt I would not be able to portray them authentically. I am finding my confidence to write about people from all kinds of backgrounds, because in the end, human nature and relationships are similar anywhere in the world.

If you could be transported instantly, anywhere in the world, where would you most like to spend your time writing? And why?

I would love to return to Mumbai, and since all this is happening magically, I’d love to have a little cottage by the sea near Mumbai. Write on a balcony with a sea view, while being constantly supplied with coconut water and prawn fry. A well stocked library, and a well stocked fridge, friends, family and regular train journeys to Mumbai would be my fodder for a great writing life!

What is the one book you wish you had written?

I wish I had written A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It’s a beautifully written book about the lives of a widowed Parsi woman, Dina, two tailors who work for her business at her home, and a young man who comes from a distant town to work in the city and is a lodger in Dina’s home. It is set during the Emergency in India. The language is beautiful and the plot is so intricate, and the story so touching, it transports me straight into their lives every time I read it.

What advice do you have for would be novelists?

It’s not any new advice, but the same old, same old. But it works. Read. Write. Read. Read. Read. Write. If you are lucky to find a writers’ group that works for you, then it’s a great opportunity to share your work, read others’ works and discuss. Be open to criticism and do not look down on other people’s work. Everyone has their own readership, and audience which may work or may not work for you.

What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to reading?

I am currently working on my second novel, and also a few memoir essays. I hope to have my collection of short stories published. I'd love to write a travel memoir of my time at sea with my husband.

Who is your favourite literary character from childhood and why?

My favourite character has got to be Swami, from Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan. I read Enid Blyton as a kid, and fantasised about having adventures on the moors and islands. But I didn’t know what a moor was. I had never tasted potted meat or ginger beer. But here was Swami, a naughty little boy in the imaginary village of Malgudi. His adventures, or rather misadventures, were more relatable. The stories were adapted into a hugely popular television serial, and it was a topic of discussion in school. We all wanted to do the things that Swami and his friends did! The theme song is playing in my head as I type this!

It is sad that regional literature was not encouraged, and it was not cool to read anything other than English, when I was in school. There was a disconnect with what I read and what I experienced, as the geographies, culture, language, everything was different. I read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and I read and re-read Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  Maybe that was another book I could relate to because it could have happened anywhere.

Thank you for having me on the Greenacres Writers Blog. 


The Normal State of Mind is published by Parthian.

You can follow Susmita on Twitter: @susmitatweets

A Conversation with Mike Carey

Mike Carey was born in Liverpool, England, in 1959 – describing his young self as "one of those ominously quiet kids... [who] lived so much inside my own head I only had vestigial limbs". As a child, he maintained an interest in comics, writing and drawing primitive stories to entertain his younger brother. He studied English at St Peter's College, Oxford before becoming a teacher. He continued to teach for 15 years before moving on to writing comics.

M. R. Carey is an established and prolific British writer of prose fiction and comic books. He has written extensively in the field of comic books, completing long and critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. His ongoing comic book series for DC Vertigo, The Unwritten, has featured repeatedly in the New York Times' graphic novel bestseller list. His superhero series Suicide Risk, published by BOOM! Studios, has been nominated for two Harvey awards. He is also the writer of the Felix Castor novels, and (along with his wife Linda and their daughter Louise) of two fantasy novels, The City Of Silk and Steel and The House Of War and Witness, published in the UK by Victor Gollancz. He writes mainstream thrillers as Adam Blake, and as M.R.Carey is the author of the bestselling novel The Girl With All the Gifts which has been adapted into a movie. The world premiere of Scottish director Colm McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic thriller, starring Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine and newcomer Sennia Nanua, will open the 69th Locarno Film Festival this Wednesday, 3rd August.

We’d like to thank Mike for taking part in A Conversation… and send our congratulations for the forthcoming film and the books and more books. When Mike was a guest at last year's Finchley Literary Festival; some of the Greenacre Writers auditioned for Girl. Lindsay Bamfield as Miss Justineau and Rosie Canning as Melanie - though unfortunately they don't appear in the film. However, GW are looking forward to seeing the film when it reaches the local cinema and will organise a special Zombie film feast. 

Tell us of your journey as a writer

It’s been very exciting and very unpredictable. I never really had any kind of a career plan, I just wrote whatever felt right to me and said yes to every opportunity that came up. Probably that lack of planning is the reason why it took me so long to get anywhere, but it’s also why I’ve done such a wide range of things – comics, novels, short stories, screenplays, radio plays, game scripts and so on. There’s a poem by Theodore Roethke that includes the line “I learn by going where I need to go”. I’ve tended to work like that. I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend it, but it’s made for a really interesting career. That is, if what I do counts as a career.

I started out writing reviews and articles for comics magazines. Then I pitched some stories for comic book series and got them commissioned, working my way through indie publishers in the UK and the US before I was finally offered a mini-series by DC Comics. For the next decade of my life, comics were what I mostly lived and breathed. I wrote literally hundreds of scripts – for Lucifer, Hellblazer, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, The Unwritten. And then at a certain point I started to write novels alongside the comics. With very varied success, it has to be said, but I really enjoyed what I was doing and I gradually got more and more confident in terms of experimenting with different kinds of storytelling, different approaches and voices.

Probably the breakthrough moment was when I collaborated with my wife Linda and our daughter Louise on two fantasy novels. Co-writing allows you to see into your blind spots. It’s a very rewarding exercise in that respect, as well as being enjoyable in its own right.

How do you see your role as a writer and what do you like most about it?
I think storytelling is one of the most amazing things you can do, and to do it for a living is an enormous privilege. Storytellers entertain and enrich us, allow us to live in counterfactual worlds. And they hold mirrors up to the real world that help us to understand who and what we are.

What I love most is being able to have an emotional impact on an audience – to make them happy or sad or thoughtful or amused. It’s a kind of magic. There’s no other way to describe it.

Have you ever created a character who you dislike but find yourself empathising with?

All the time! I think that’s absolutely key to good writing. You have to write everyone from the inside, and see their point of view. Even if they’re monsters and their point of view is indefensible.

A good example would be Caroline Caldwell in The Girl With All the Gifts. She’s very easy to hate. She kills children and forgives herself. But from her point of view she’s the hero of that story. She’s working to save the world, and she’s done the sums in her head. A few dozen deaths, or a few hundred, or a few thousand, to save untold millions and give the human species a chance at survival. She feels absolutely justified. And when I wrote her scenes I wanted the reader to be able to see that point of view. There’s no point in writing pantomime villains unless you’re writing a pantomime.

Last year, GW organised #diverseauthorday. What has been your experience of writing about diverse characters?

I think it’s a very important thing to be aware of. I write speculative fiction, almost without exception – fantasy, horror and sci-fi – so I’m often writing characters who belong to non-human races or who have attributes that take them way outside the human norm. But it’s astonishing and distressing to see how many stories in these genres still take the white straight guy as the standard of normality. I try very hard not to do that. When I started out I found it easier to write male protagonists (Lucifer, John Constantine, Felix Castor, etc) but even in those books I tried to create a kind of balance by building supporting casts that were dominated by women. And then when I started to write stories with ensemble casts I tended to put women in the lead roles. I also tried to include characters of different races, and to recognise that there’s no such thing as normal when it comes to sexuality. There’s just a spectrum.

Rhetoric aside, you can only write from one perspective – which is to say your own. But you can think about your own default settings and consciously interrogate them. Monochrome fictions are sort of a sad act in the genres I write in. What, you’re trying to imagine magical or alien realms and you can’t even get past your own parochialisms? All alien races have binary gender, binary sexuality, patriarchal power structures? You might as well be writing for Mills and Boon.

If you could be transported instantly, anywhere in the world, where would you most like to spend your time writing? And why?

Southern France. Stunningly beautiful countryside, great food, a gentle pace of life, endless opportunities to stop and smell the roses. The few times I’ve been there I’ve come away feeling refreshed and energised. I don’t think I’ll ever retire, but if I ever got rich I’d rent a villa in Provence for six months or a year and write an entire novel there.

What is the one book you wish you had written?

That’s a very tough question. I’m going to say Watership Down. It’s got that quality that lets you read it again and again and never get tired of it. And it immerses you utterly in its world.

What advice do you have for would be novelists?

There are three things that seem to me to be really obvious and really essential.

First, you can’t write if you don’t read. You’ve got to LOVE reading, and read endlessly. You’ve got to care about story. Your own voice starts out as an amalgm of the voices you’ve read and loved.

Then you’ve got to write. And you’ve got to really keep at it. Writing is a lot of things, but at its heart it’s a mechanical skill – like riding a bike or knife-throwing. You get better at it by doing it. You hone your skill. You can’t expect to be a literary genius straight out of the box.

And finally you’ve got to get opinions. I talked earlier about seeing into your blind spot – it’s something you really need to try to do. Read your stuff aloud to other people, or get them to read it and critique it. Join a writers’ group, or shamelessly exploit your family and friends (either way works). Honest opinions are like gold. By contrast, people who tell you you’re amazing aren’t worth all that much. You already know that, right?

What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to reading?

I’m working on a screenplay for my most recent novel, Fellside. And I’ve just submitted a new novel to Little Brown called Bedlam Bridge. It’s similar to The Girl With All the Gifts in some ways – it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi. But it does its own thing. And I’m writing a comic book for a French publisher, Glenat, which is an epic fantasy with a political edge. It’s called Highest House, and Peter Gross is doing the art.

Who is your favourite literary character from childhood and why?

Probably Arrietty from the Borrowers books. I loved her courage and her curiosity. And I loved the way things that were familiar to me became strange and wonderful when they were seen through her eyes.

You can follow Mike on Twitter: @michaelcarey191
Thanks to Mike for the review copy of Fellside.

First prize winner in GW/FLF Short Story competition 2016.

The Sender of Second Chances by Anthea Morrison

Chock-a-block all the way down on the bus today so I’m upstairs.  Sun’s hot through the glass but best not take my coat off, I’ll be getting ripe underneath it and there’s stains on my dress won’t sponge off with cold water.  Place I’m staying in now, you have to be up with the larks and up for a fight if you want hot water, and I’m past that now.

Not much happening on the street down there – folk scurrying about with their heads down mostly.  Think who they might see if they’d only look up now and then - neighbour, friend, old lover.  Or a stranger with silver buttons on his coat, and a smile like summer.  Saw him pluck up the courage - come to the sea with me, he said, train to Margate; go on, you only live once. 

You get the teenagers upstairs, flicking their hair, putting on a show, no idea the thousand different ways their lives might turn out.  Downstairs the mums battle their prams and kids, promising the moon to keep the peace.  Missed that boat years ago, but I keep a picture in my head of what could have been; a boy I like to think, with that same sunny smile.  Daft, I know.

Bus swings into a stop at Kennington Park, usual clatter of branches from the chestnut tree against the windows.  Young woman comes upstairs - something promising about this one, not plugged into her phone like most.  She has a proper look at people, gives me a smile instead of a wide berth and sits down in front of me.  Her eyes are grey and ever so clear, like the rock pool where we sat down at Margate, dipping our feet while we told each other everything we were, all that we wanted to be. The rock was warm and smooth under my feet when we kissed.

We lurch away up Kennington Road.  Driver yesterday kept sending the tots flying into everyone’s legs - miracle how some of them pass their test - I shot my arm out to catch one, human instinct, but the mum grabbed him off me quick as a stick, eyes wide.  

I don’t blame her.  The years haven’t been kind and nor has some of the company I’ve kept, grog included.  Thirty years and more since I sent him away, after the sand had gone cold under our feet and everyone else was going home. Make a mistake big as that, you stop trusting yourself to make decisions, just let life carry you.

Going round the corner at Lambeth, the woman in front has to grab the pole to stop herself being hurled off her seat by Stirling Moss down there.  Her hair’s dead straight, the colour of conkers, something like mine when I was a girl. 

Waterloo Bridge, and we’re almost full.  Last one to come up is a tall fella with a full beard, trimmed neat like his Brylcreemed hair.  A stillness about him, something solid.  He has a look down the bus and starts to turn back when he spots the last two empty seats, next to me or next to her – well, no prizes. 

Got a good feeling about these two.  They clock each other just a bit longer than they need to as he sits down.  His eyes are set deep and his smile is slow, trace of an old sorrow in it, maybe.  I feel the spark, probably before they do.  She runs her hand down the side of her neck, smoothing her hair, and he straightens his shirt collar, first one side then the other.  I whip out my notepad and scribble, pencil shooting off the page as Stirling throws the bus round the corner at the Aldwych.  They turn towards each other again, not quite in time, and I can’t see from behind whether they’ve caught eyes, but I’ve been doing this for so long I pick up the smallest signs, and I see them lean a hair’s breadth closer.

The woman turns her face like she’s looking out the window, dabs something on her lips from a silver tube in her pocket, faces forward again with a little shake of that lovely hair. Go on, say something one of you, God love us!  But when the brakes get slammed on at Holborn Tube, he gets up slowly, flashing her a smile with a pound of regret in it before he disappears down the stairs.  She half rises, hitching her bag strap over her shoulder, but no.  She sinks down and sighs, twisting her hair round the fingers of her right hand.  No point telling her what I think, she’d smile politely and pull a book out of her bag.

Hundreds of missed chances like this every day, but I can’t be everywhere at once.  Sometimes people take the plunge afterwards and send a message into one of the free papers that get left all over the seats:  ‘To the girl on the District line with the blonde hair and the black coat’ –well that narrows it down – ‘I can’t stop thinking about you, please get in touch.’  That’s why I carry a notepad, so I can get all the details, so there can be no doubt.

Her coat’s the same colour as his all those years ago, silver buttons on the shoulders catching the moonlight after I sent him away down Margate seafront, slowly shaking his head.  I thought there’d be others could make me feel the same.  Didn’t know I’d fallen in love.  

I know the PO Box number by heart. I write out the rest of the message:  ‘To the woman on the No.59 to King’s Cross, Tuesday 1st October – chestnut hair, grey eyes, olive coat, amber earrings, and the man who sat next to her over Waterloo Bridge - red and black checked shirt, brown leather satchel, beard - I saw you both wondering What If?  Here is your second chance.’

Greenacre Writers Groups

Greenacre Writers have four groups:

Fiction Writers Group meet every 6 weeks on a Tuesday. 

The format involves selected members’ work sent to fellow members for critiquing and feedback at the following meeting. We provide guidelines for feedback. We do not carry out writing exercises at meetings. Membership requires a commitment and regular attendance (ie: you should expect to attend the majority of meetings.) 

Finish that Novel group meets the third Monday monthly.

The FTN2 group is for writers currently working on novels, autobiography or memoir. The format involves selected members’ work sent to fellow members for critiquing and feedback at the following meeting. We provide guidelines for feedback. We do not carry out writing exercises at meetings. Membership requires a commitment and regular attendance (ie: you should expect to attend the majority of meetings.) 

Memoir Course starts in September 2016

What's the difference between a memoir and an autobiography? Let's start with that question,  where so much confusion lies. Now get this clear.  A MEMOIR is a part of your life.  An autobiography is the whole thing, the whole life.  OK.  Got that now?  Let's move on. 

Anna Meryt will be running a Memoir Course as part of Greenacre Writers

There’ll be seven 1.5 hour sessions, the venue will be in North London and the cost for the entire course will be £70 (payable in advance for the course, (concessions price available on request).

You've got a story only you can tell.

Novel Focus Group starts in October 2016

Allen Ashley has been successfully running a Novel Focus Group on behalf of Greenacre Writers since October 2015. The current round of sessions concludes in July. Allen is keen to take on a new cohort of would-be novelists for the next academic year, starting October 2016. Subjects covered will include:  Novel planning, Structure, First pages and chapters, Characterisation, Location, Dialogue, Pacing, Style and Editing techniques. If you are serious about settling into writing your novel, this is the course for you. 

For more information contact Greenacre Writers: greenacrewriters@gmail.com 

Second prize winner in GW/FLF Short Story competition 2016.

The Wondwossi Hotel Bar by James Woolf

They visited her for years, this eccentric old aristocrat on the hillside; businessmen, tourists, journalists, teachers, and locals alike. 

   As often as not, they came here to stop, to escape the thrum and turbulence of the city, and perhaps to have a conversation. Sometimes these conversations led to love affairs or business deals and occasionally to squalid fights on the terrace. Other interactions fizzled and were forgotten in moments.

   For when they are here, these patrons, standing tall on the varnished wooden floor, they are the hotel bar’s life blood, as if they’ve never existed elsewhere. But when they are gone, others step up immediately, chuntering between the white walls and cultural bric-a-brac, equally present and alive: they too become the place itself.

   Over there, a young boy sits with his father – in that corner, under the solemn painting of the two brothers. He drinks lemonade as a reward for his achievements at the chess table. His father, in Addis Ababa for a year on business, is repeating the history of this museum piece, built on the whim of an empress at the dawn of the twentieth century. But Oliver is eavesdropping on a young European couple, hoping to hear words of love, which will mean that they are having sex. Years from now, he will return to the Wondwossi Hotel and, in this same bar, will meet an academic from Jijiga. This woman, apparently with no agenda other than to speak with him, and to laugh, will join him at the night’s end in the four-poster bed in his high ceilinged room. And again, years later, when he sets out to find her, he’ll discover that she had become pregnant with his child. 

   Yeneta, the new barman serves cheap draft beer to Oliver’s father. He’s concerned that his mental arithmetic skills may be insufficient for the job. He plans to study biology but will become distracted by friends, and then by a family, and will work at the Wondwossi for years to come. When asked about studying, he’ll say that people are his subject and that observing them is life’s greatest lesson. In a decade or so, Judy, whose conversation Oliver was straining to overhear, will also return. She’ll spend a week, sitting alone in the bar, consuming trashy novels, whilst trying to decide what to do with her life.

   Judy feels let down by her bicycling husband; and certainly, in the Wondwossi, many promises are made and just as many broken. Many pairs of roving eyes are noticed by Yeneta. He notices everything, in fact, until – returning home one wretched night – he is caught beneath the wheels of a motorcycle and never regains consciousness.

   Yeneta’s fate still awaits him when Oliver collides with Habesha in the hotel’s revolving doors. Oliver apologises and begins a conversation. The bar by now shows signs of shabbiness. Plaster falls from the white walls leaving gaps like pock-marked skin. It is though in many respects still a fine hotel. Ethiopian jazz plays once again in the club, after music all but died during the Red Terror. Oliver tells Habesha about his chess tournaments as a boy and how happy he is to be back after all this time. Habesha talks of a memory of riding with her father on their only camel to see her dying grandmother in a Jijiga hospital; her first visit away from their mud-hut to the city; her first sip of Coca Cola; her first sight of the university where she would work.

   You can see how they bring pieces of themselves, but how, mostly, their lives are left outside. Like Mitiku, who returns nightly for what seems like months with his friend Nega after the sudden death of Mitiku’s young bride. In this bar, she is neither named nor mentioned, because language can be stretched to cover the holes in people’s lives. But she is present in the looks that pass between the two old friends as they raise their glasses in their nightly journey towards oblivion.

   And they spot, but do not speak with, Judy, immersed in her week of intensive reading, although she does have a single conversation with Jared, an ex-soldier, and Yeneta clocks this, and also sees them stealing away from the bar together before Judy returns alone (within the hour).

   Over the years, so many thoughts unspoken. So many people kept waiting for dates by careless partners who will arrive and apologise so loudly and profusely that the very bar itself believes their words to be sincere. So many messages left on cell phones, or at the reception desk in the cavernous vestibule, including many for Judy from Jared (all of which naturally go unanswered).

   There were rumours, tensions of course, and everyone knew the potential capabilities of Al-Shabaab to strike in the heart of the capital. But nobody saw it coming in the way that it did. 

   A newspaper with the headline RIP THE WONDWOSSI lies face up in the rubble. Now in their fifties, standing in front of the ruins and attempting to understand what has happened, Oliver and Habesha feel as if this is already old news. 

   They had seen the story of the series of strategic explosions which had taken out different parts of the historic hotel. They had watched it on television in their small Jijiga flat. They had acted as one and driven over to Addis Ababa the next day. 

   The walls are collapsed. Historic artefacts destroyed. Oliver and Habesha know that thirty seven are dead and dozens more wounded. 

   Their grown-up daughter, Lola, is with them. She is training to be a chemist and they have many hopes and fears for her future. They point to the entrance where they first met – “is that really the remains of the revolving door?” – and they hold hands, the three of them, they actually stand on that spot once again, but are moved on by a security man. 

   “This site is not safe,” he says. “Please. Please move along.”