Tea for the Rent Boy, and other stories
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 67610111
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Wild Harbour Books
- ISBN
- 1999718925
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The stories in this collection were written over a period of years, assisted by a £10,000 Creative-Scotland Writers Bursary (2011). The sum applied for was £5,000 but Creative-Scotland awarded double this amount on grounds of the perceived quality of the work. The bursary enabled me to reduce my teaching-load for a short period and facilitated writing retreats in Northern-Norway (2014, 2015). Like all creative work, the project was exploratory and evolved over time, a growing sense of the textual conversations between stories affecting the size, form and content of the whole.
My previous collection, set in 1980s/90s Poland, was organised chronologically, held together by a central narrator and the element of fictional memoir. There is some continuity here, as Polish themes resurface in two stories: a Polish woman’s experience of migration to Scotland (‘The Mintie Wifie’); the long aftermath of genocide in Eastern-Poland (now Ukraine) and the continuing Polish struggle with acknowledging contradictory ‘truths’ regarding wartime anti-Semitism (‘Sapozhkelekh’). However, the range of voices, historical and geographical settings deployed in these narratives is broader, proceeding on the premise that character and experience are inseparable from regional or historically- grounded utterance used to express them.
This led to some experimentation with distinctive first-person dialect voices, whether ‘Poglish’ or North-East Scots, Yorkshire, posh 1940s expat or rural Southern English, culminating in a rendering of the musings of a seventeenth-century French Jesuit in seventeenth-century Protestant English (‘Ouenaye at the Post’). A rare intersection with my academic research, this was perhaps the most enjoyable to write, not least as retaliation for many hours spent saturated in renaissance textual contempt for women (slaves, ‘barbarians’ and ‘others’ of all hues). It is also a celebration of that linguistic sound-world which most historical fiction, in endeavouring to generate identification for contemporary readers, omits.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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