Sparks: New Writing from Bath Spa [Paperback]

Sparks showcases the best new writing from the MA programmes at Bath Spa University - one of the UK's leading centres for creative writing. Containing stories, poems, and excerpts from novels and scripts, this wide-ranging anthology celebrates the diversity and originality of tomorrow's award-winning and bestselling writers. Be the first to read a new generation of exciting voices in fiction.

Sparks features an interview with bestselling author, Mo Hayder, and an introduction by Gerard Woodward, (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2004 and T.S. Eliot Prize 2005).

"A rich and zesty collection. The writing is sharp, engrossing, witty – these tasters left me wanting more." - Tricia Wastvedt, author of 'The River'

"Funny, moving, racy, exciting, challenging ...new voices from talented writers to delight...all ages. These really are writers to watch!"
- Julia Green, author of 'Hunter's Heart' and 'Baby Blue'

"There are some exceptional writers included in here: funny, original, intelligent, and brilliant with words."
- Tessa Hadley, author of 'Accidents In The Home' and 'Everything Will Be All Right'

Introduction by Gerard Woodward (Booker Prize shortlisted for I'll Go To Bed At Noon)
I first decided I wanted to be a novelist at the age of eleven. I sat down with a Black Prince pencil and a scuffed exercise book and began to write a story about a robbery in a pet shop. This robbery is witnessed only by a talking mynah bird, whose endless reiteration of a phrase spoken by one of the thieves provides the detectives with their one lead – or at least it would do if they could catch it! The bird flies all around London, pursued by the detectives, and ends up at Battersea fun fair where there’s a climactic, clambering chase on the big wheel.
When I think about this story now I’m suddenly struck by its absurd aptness as a subject for an embryonic writer- the desperate pursuit of an exotic bird whose only utterance is a fragment of incomprehensible language, repeated endlessly. I sometimes feel I’ve been chasing this mynah bird all my life, that’s it’s always perched on a twig just out of reach, preening itself and chuckling at me. That’s what the writing life can seem like at times. The solitary hunt for the uncatchable, the journey without maps.

MA courses in creative writing provide an alternative (at least temporarily) to this type of existence. I have never attended a course myself but I imagine the experience must be rather similar to discovering there’s a party going on in a room of the empty house you’ve always lived in. You wonder where these people have been all your life, and now here they are, full of conversation and ideas, laughter and dancing, and you can actually understand what they are saying. Writing is suddenly a social activity and friendships are formed that outgrow the year-long course that nurtured them. At Bath Spa University it is said that workshop groups still meet informally in the town a decade after graduation. And each year brings its new cohort of writers, many of whom will settle permanently in the area. By such sedimentary accumulation Bath should eventually fill with writers to the brim.

An anthology such as this, then, representing as it does the work of the Bath Spa students of 2004-5 (including those on the newly formed MA in Writing for Young People), is much more than simply a show case of new writing (though it is an outstanding one of those), it is a captured moment in time of the creative lives of forty or so people. Forged in the intense heat of our seminar workshops these are not just novel extracts, stories, poems and scripts, they are arguments, friendships, squabbles, jokes and rambling conversations in the pub.

As for the quality of the work, I can only let it speak for itself. Bath Spa has an outstanding track record of producing writers who go on to achieve publishing or broadcasting success, and this year’s students will add substantially to that tally.

Now hand me my shotgun. I’ve just spotted that bird again.