Feminist Finance: Recessionistas, Debt and the Credit Crunch

This article offers an opposing argument to the «man-cession» narrative that has dominated the press in recent years and explores what makes this particular economic context crucial for contemporary women’s fiction, offering a view into the recession’s impact on women’s lives, reading, consumption patterns, and self-identity in today’s post-credit-crunch world. The credit crunch has reignited debates about gender and the workplace in twenty-first century society. This article proposes that tensions between gender and debt have been played out in popular culture post-2007, most notably in publishing, through the emergence of a new genre of literature – Recessionista fiction. In Recessionista fictions, cocktails and heels are eschewed in favour of financial practicality, as shopaholic heroines confront a harsh new reality, forced into a position where they must take stock of their lives and start again from the midst of financial ruin, divorce or a major career change. As part of this process, Recessionista fiction foregrounds the impact of the credit crunch on female identity. This article examines a range of Recessionista fictions to explore how, why and with what effects the heroines of these novels intern and reify the attitudes of society during and after the global credit crunch. Examining an evolution in contemporary fiction that brought a taste of reality to an outdated chick lit genre in danger of extinction, the article analyses representations of gender and debt and the possibilities for personal transformation brought about by the global economic downturn

Interview with Mark Watson

Mark Watson is a British comedian and novelist. His five novels to date – Bullet Points (2004), A Light-Hearted Look At Murder (2007), Eleven (2010), The Knot (2012) and Hotel Alpha (2014) – explore human relationships and communities in contemporary society. His latest novel Hotel Alpha tells the story of an extraordinary hotel in London and two mysterious disappearances that raise questions no one seems willing to answer. External to the novel, readers can also discover more about the hotel and its inhabitants in one hundred extra stories that expand the world of the novel and can be found at http://www.hotelalphastories.com. In conversation here with Dr Katy Shaw, Mark offers some reflections on his writing process, the field of contemporary literature, and the vitality of the novel form in the twenty-first century

Something Wicked This Way Comes: An Interview with Katie Lowe

In conversation with C21 Literature Katie Lowe considers how and why her experience as a literary critic of contemporary writing has led to and influenced her own creative practice and perspectives on the contemporary themes and concerns directly addressed by her debut work The Furies (2019)

Satirical Apocalypse: Endism and the 1990s Fictions of Will Self

(Will Self, ‘Ingenious Bubble Wrap’, 26) [T]he 1990s will come to be seen as the Gotterdammerung of periodicity itself. […] [N]ever again will the brute fact of what year it is matter so much in cultural terms. In ‘The Valley of the Corn Dollies’ in the Guardian in 1994, Will Self said of his homeland: ‘It is a culture of profound and productive oppositions. And I believe, personally, the best possible country for someone with a satirical bent to live in. I’d go further: England has the world’s top satirical culture’ (Junk Mail, 204) . Elsewhere in ‘Conversations: Martin Amis’, Self ‘unquestionably’ situates himself as part of that heritage (408) , working in literary satire, aware of his antecedents. Satire itself has a long tradition, traced back variously to Ancient Egypt and to Greece, to the Romans and to Medieval Europe, although arguably the role of satire as a mode..

Bridging the Gender Gap in Forest Stewardship: Facilitating Programs for Women Landowners

Nationwide, women woodland owners are increasingly taking on the primary decision-making role for their land. In Wisconsin and beyond, most existing landowner outreach efforts target mixed-gender audiences. We explored how facilitation techniques can be incorporated into a women-centric workshop to increase women landowners\u27 confidence, knowledge, and readiness to take action in forest stewardship. We highlight three core techniques Extension workshop developers can use to promote landowner learning and engagement: creating space for participant-driven open dialogue, generating opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, and enabling participants to receive personalized advice from professionals about their land

Common People: Breaking the Class Ceiling in UK Publishing

The United Kingdom has just one percent of the world’s population but is the largest exporter of books in the world. As a thriving creative industry, UK publishing also makes a significant indirect economic contribution to the British economy via immediately adjacent sectors including retail, printing and marketing. However, the under-representation of British working class writers in UK publishing has been identified as a major social and economic challenge by both the publishing industry and the British government. In 2018, Arts Council England funded the first ever writing development programme for British working class writers that aimed to address this imbalance. This article assesses for the first time the impact of this unique initiative on both creatives and the creative industry in the UK, as well as on wider awareness of the presence and impact of the class ceiling in UK publishing

The Value of Writing: The Northern Writers’ Awards: 2000-2018

This research explores, for the first time, the various impacts of the Northern Writers’ Awards (NWAs) on its winning authors, their writing practice and subsequent professional development. The research is based on the results of an online survey of previous Northern Writers’ Awards winners conducted by Professor Katy Shaw of Northumbria University. The survey was designed to examine impact, identify elements of best practice, and consider opportunities for future enhancement of the awards. The survey was sent to 168 respondents in February 2018 and generated a 55% return rate. This report also draws on demographic and other data collated by New Writing North as part of their own monitoring of the awards

Common People: Breaking the Glass Ceiling in UK Publishing

The under-representation of British working-class writers in UK publishing has been identified as a major challenge by international publishing houses including Penguin Random House and Hachette UK, and also by the British and Scottish governments. The challenge not only impacts the publishing sector, but adjacent creative industries: the outputs of the UK publishing industry provide source material for other creative industries, including theatre, television, film and video games, meaning issues of representation in publishing can have magnified economic and cultural consequences. The Common People project arose out of an on-going programme of work that New Writing North has undertaken in recent years within the publishing industry to highlight issues of regional and class diversity and representation. With Writing West Midlands, New Writing North brought together the other regional writing development agencies: New Writing South, National Centre for Writing, Writing East Midlands, Literature Works and Spread the Word with the writer Kit de Waal, the publisher Unbound and Arts Council England, to create a new book and an associated development programme for the new writers involved. The project ran for 12 months from 2018-19. It aimed to create a strategic model of intervention to address the under-representation of working-class writers in publishing today