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Featuring CN Lester Jet Moon Juliet Jacques Sanam Amin Raju Rage Mark Brown Scott Esposito Barney Walsh Unlock more information about how you could benefit by visiting www.alcs.co.uk

Cover Art by Si Scott

July 2015

Litro Magazine 44

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Issue 144 • Transgender • July 2015

CONTRIBUTORS07 EDITOR’S LETTER09 BODIES10 WALKING WITH ALICE12 THE HOLIDAY CAMP16 RECOGNITION24 FILLING IN/FILLING OUT: FITTING IN/FITTING OUT: 27 THE DILEMMA OF THE DIASPORA TO DEFINE THOSE WE LEAVE BEHIND31

BITS OF ME35

THE SKIN I LIVE IN33

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Have you ever had anything published?

If you’ve written a book or had an article published, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) could be holding money owed to you.

ALCS collects secondary royalties earned from a number of sources including the photocopying and scanning of books.

Unlock more information about how you could benefit by visiting www.alcs.co.uk July 2015

Litro Magazine 6

Contributors Litro Magazine • Issue 144 • Transgender • July 2015

CN Lester

Juliet Jacques Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer, whose short fiction has appeared in PEN International’s OutWrite series, Berfrois, Five Dials, The London Magazine, 3:AM and elsewhere.

Her journalism has featured in The Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Granta and other publications and websites, and her memoir, entitled Trans, will be issued

by Verso Books in September 2015.

CN Lester is a singersongwriter, writer, classical musician, and activist. They founded the first Gay/Straight Alliance in the UK, co-founded Queer Youth Network, run cross-genre art night Transpose, and consult/educate on trans issues with, amongst other, London Assembly, NASUWT, NUS and Channel 4. Performances include: Tate Modern, Kings Place, Southbank Centre, Handel House, Silent Opera, BFI, Prides and universities throughout the UK.

Sanam Amin Sanam Amin is a writer and journalist currently based in Thailand. She is also secretly the fifth ninja turtle, and has probably saved your life at least twice.

When not fighting crime, she uses her spare time to write stories.

Jet Moon Jet Moon is a writer, performer, pervert and political activist, performing in clubs, collaborating to create events, writing texts that feature marginalised voices.

Jet lives on a council estate in East London and does immoral things for profit and fun.

Scott Esposito Raju Rage Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist, creativecritical writer and community organiser who is proactive about carving space, selfrepresentation and self-empowerment using art and activism to forge creative survival.

They are interested in the role of art in social change and transformative healing justice. They are a member of an arts collective: Collective Creativity. www.rajurage.com

Si Scott

Mark Brown Mark Brown does mental health stuff mostly. He once spent a year just writing 200 word short stories. He is @markoneinfour on Twitter.

Scott Esposito is the co-author (with Lauren Elkin) of The End of Oulipo?

He is currently writing a short book on gender, to be published next year.

He has recently published essays and criticism in The White Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and Music & Literature.

Si Scott's work stretches across art direction and creative consultation, to lectures and exhibitions; with global recognition from creative industries and institutions. His work has been regularly awarded and featured in numerous publications, including being listed in the Best 200 Design Moments Ever by Computer Arts Magazine, and honoured twice in Luerzer's Archive—The Best 200 Illustrators In The World.

Barney Walsh

Barney Walsh is a graduate of the University of Manchester’s MA in creative writing whose stories have appeared in Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 7, The Big Issue in the North: Award for Short Fiction 2013, Unthology 4, The Warwick Review, Unthology 7, Inky Needles’ Celebrity and Speed.

EDITORIAL

Issue 144 • Transgender • July 2015

Dear Reader, trans people worldwide have been so dismal.

Where trans people have appeared in literary fiction, we have tended to be one-dimensional characters, ciphers for an author’s wider opinions about gender, used to make a narrative more ‘exotic’ or to give it a ‘twist’.

Putting together a transgender edition of Litro has been a harder endeavour than you may imagine. Over the last five years, huge strides have been made towards better trans visibility and self-representation. In the US, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock have spoken beautifully on the challenges faced by trans people, particularly trans women of colour, whilst Chelsea Manning, Laura Jane Grace and Caitlyn Jenner have all raised the profile of our community. In Britain, there are more newspaper articles and television programmes being produced from a trans perspective than ever more, as people recognise the damage done by the mainstream media and its sensationalistic, voyeuristic coverage of trans people and attempt to carve out some space for themselves.

Here, I have tried to feature writers who identify as trans and/or queer, and write from such a position, although I am not certain that all of them do—just that they seem sensitive to the people and issues involved. As a voracious reader of fiction, I am delighted to showcase several short stories. The first is by writer/performer Jet Moon, who I encountered at the Transfabulous Festival of International Transgender Arts in 2008, which showed me a world of poetry, performance and playfulness that I’d never thought possible as a closeted teen, ten years earlier. I have also included a story by Sanam Amin, an author from Thailand whose subtle approach to the subject undercuts any preconceptions one may have about the nation’s kathoey or ‘third gender’ community, and a long piece by Barney Walsh, as well as flash fiction by Mark Brown.

Traditionally, trans writing has focused on autobiography and memoir—the only means by which the first transsexual people could explain themselves to a bewildered public— and then theory, which responded to attacks from feminist and conservative critics alike. I tried to secure an extract of a book by one the most influential 1990s theorists, Kate Bornstein, as her work had a huge effect on me when I read Gender Outlaw as a confused twenty-something, and led me to a long line of trans and queer authors whose ideas changed the way I thought about sex and gender—and not just my own.

Sadly, I couldn’t, so I hope you are not too disappointed with one of my short stories, set in the 1990s, as a substitute.

There are also essays by Scott Esposito, who came out as trans in a stunning article about Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and his own gender last year—in this issue I present another piece of his highly personal film criticism, this time on Pedro Almodóvar. Also included are a poetic text by artist Raju Rage about clothing, gender, race and identity, and musician, writer and activist CN Lester taking down the cliché of being ‘born in the wrong body’. That seems an appropriate place to begin, so welcome to the transgender edition of Litro. Juliet Jacques, GUEST EDITOR

There is very little ‘literary’ fiction by trans people. Excluded from ‘serious’ art as our identities have been dismissed as inauthentic, we have tended to prefer genre fiction, or to focus on activism, as the political situations for

July 2015

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BODIES Meditating on a Joan Miró painting, Lester asks if perhaps we’re not trapped in the wrong body, but stuck in the wrong society.

by CN Lester There are phrases, ideas, that you learn trans people use before you ever learn how to express yourself as a trans person. “Trapped in the wrong body” is one of them—perhaps the most potent. “I was born in the wrong body” is a shibboleth of understanding between my world and that of people who are, supposedly, unified within their own skin. Even my language now, here, alludes to it—as though there is a self within me, a skin under my skin, disguised and hiding, contained and repressed. A doubleness that is extraordinary and in need of correction.

It’s a phrase I hear often as someone who is publicly, legibly trans—sometimes professionally so. It stuck in my head last year, when I was sketching notes for a performance piece, a meditation on Miro’s 1927 work Painting.

I love that work: its boldness, the spareness of line and content, a blue that makes my mouth water before I can form a cogent response. Most of all it is the sense of dissolution of form, a denial of object permanence, that calls to my own unstable sense of place and time, and my body bound between those axes. I was meant to be responding to this work ‘as’ a trans person—as someone who could mediate my response to this piece to a mixed audience who would want to hear explained, or echoed, what it is to be trans, to be a trans artist, to be a trans person viewed through the lens of Western art practice/s. And so that phrase came back to me, in a way in which it hadn’t before.

I had never really liked the idea of being trapped in the wrong body, although I have used the words many times. It had particular appeal as a teenager, when I couldn’t understand why I felt like clawing myself apart in desperation, with the feeling that something essential would emerge—and in the last few weeks before surgery, when the claustrophobia got so bad I would have panic attacks that would stop me from sleeping. I liked it because it expressed so vividly the alienation and violence of dysphoria—but it left me uneasy. There was no space in that framing for what is right and loved about me. It tells me that my genitals, my secondary sexual characteristics, are more myself than my ability to hear, my sense of taste, the puckering of my skin. There is no acceptance of the positive presence of that dysphoria, that wrongess, in the construction of my self, the self which is trapped, but also shaped and responding. It implies a binary of mind and body beyond a binary of sex and gender, and leaves no allowance for a blurring of any of those categories. And, in looking at the Miro, noting my physical, emotional, response, it felt as though that phrase took my body and my sense thereof—fragmented, unstable, imagined, corporeal and non-corporeal both—and it stripped it from me, or I from it.

With that phrase I am placed into a narrative not of my choosing, in which my physical entry into the world becomes a placeholder for a story I do not wish to tell.

What is unique, contradictory and transitional becomes lost, to be replaced by a script determined by Otherness and acquiescence.

In that framing, my transness is not normal, and my body has failed. Its failure invites gendering, judgment, constant appraisal. This is the everyday carving up and labelling by colleagues, July 2015

Litro Magazine 10

WALKING WITH ALICE Facing the laughs of women and the potential violence of men, often misogynistic and transphobic, when does one stand up for her trans friend and when is it safer to keep quiet?

by Jet Moon There’s a way she always pauses as we set off out the door, sticking out her elbow as an invitation for me to put my arm through hers. I slip my hand through the loop, taking up the support offered and rest my hand companionably on her arm. It’s a polite way to walk, formal and sedate, the walk of English ladies out for a stroll, although we are anything but your average ladies.

Stepping out into the warm summer night, as we begin our walk around the block, the air is pressing close. It’s a wetness on my skin, a hot intensity, a mix of my own perspiration and the humid moisture of the night itself.

We cross the road and there are a group of teenage girls standing at the traffic lights, they turn and stare at Alice then laugh in our faces. It’s not just the laughter, this could easily turn to push and shove. We hold our ground, return their looks and then walk on by.

At the entrance to the park there are the guys sitting and drinking on the benches near the gate as usual. I hate passing them when I’m alone, wondering what they will call out. Will it be compliments or harassment this time, and how do you pick between the two?

As we cruise through the park the air is viscous, flies buzzing, people lairy with the heat and booze.

Physical space gets blurred and we steer through an obstacle course of snide remarks, catcalls and laughter. There is no separation between our bodies and the rest of the world. The night air carries a mixture of all of us, like a murky sexual fluid palpable with hostility and aggression.

We go to turn down a side street: a shortcut we often take, except this time there’s a guy standing in the road, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his bulk blocking our path.

There’s something going down that we don’t want to be part of. I steer us straight on, I don’t want to be funny, but sometimes it’s best to take the long way around.

Back in the home stretch, and from out of nowhere a group of teenage boys are behind us, they are moving fast, drawing alongside us and then we are engulfed. I’m so scared, I’m sure we are going to get hurt. I brace myself for whatever is about to come and then they overtake us and are gone.

Alice apologises to me when we are safe at home. She is sorry I get so frightened, she blames herself. I don’t like how scared I get, it makes me so angry how people behave and I hate myself for being a coward.

Alice says it’s like this at the same time every year, always noticeable with the change in the weather.

The level of tension on the estate has been a little high lately, when it turned really hot a few days ago the feeling of aggression on the streets was something else. I worried that I had lapsed into an insane level of paranoia; sometimes I think I’m just imagining what’s going on. Alice mentioned she was happy to carry a ballpoint pen in her pocket and had been recalling techniques she had learned for using day-to-day objects as weapons.

July 2015

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THE HOLIDAY CAMP A story of awakening, of self-awareness, a realisation made in the queer underbelly of what seems like the most ‘straight’ environment imaginable.

by Juliet Jacques Sam Lightfoot was several feet taller than Snappy the Alligator, and for that reason alone, he thought he shouldn’t be there. He paused, squinting at the words YOU MUST BE SHORTER THAN ME TO RIDE, watching the rain drop down Snappy’s strangely forced half-smile. The go-kart track would have closed hours ago and anyone smaller than Snappy was probably in bed, and the last time he might have enjoyed a place like this was when he was little enough to race.

He entered the main building through the arcade, a few coins in his pocket. He put 10p into the penny pusher, knowing that if he thumped the glass, he’d get more money. Knowing also that this would get him thrown out, he didn’t, but he won enough to play a coin-op game.

Most of them were about ten years old: Bomb Jack, Paperboy, Arkanoid, even Pole Position.

A few lads crowded around Sonic Blast Man, calling their friend a “poof” for not hitting the punch pad hard enough to smash the asteroid hurtling towards Earth.

He walked past the air hockey tables to the foyer, wondering whether his parents would have gone to the Prince Albert pub or the Casablanca Showbar. He tried the pub, where two middle-aged newlyweds were mangling I Got You Babe—a favourite of his mother’s. He had long suspected that karaoke was the worst thing in the world and was pleased not to waste much time proving it.

He went to the bar, wondering how his parents were celebrating their final night at the camp.

They were near the back with a bottle of wine and a near-empty pint of lager.

“Where’s Jen?” “She got bored,” his mother replied.

“Don’t blame her,” said his father. “This is bloody embarrassing.”

“You wanted to stay. You know I hate this kind of thing.”

Sam looked at the stage. There was a drag queen in a tiara, a green dress with a skirt down to her black stilettos and a sash saying ‘Helen Heigh-Water’ in gold script. Her wig had blonde curls, her blue eyes had long lashes and her lipstick shined red, smudged across her face as she swigged Prosecco from the bottle.

Swaying, she finished Big Spender. “Seriously you posh fuckers,” she yelled, “give me some money, I’d down to my last forty Benson & Hedges. Nobody’s going to tell the DSS if you chuck a fiver onto the stage!” Sam was one of the few people to laugh. “What do you faggots want, hand jobs? You’re not so tight that you can’t part with a tenner, are you?”

She drank more Prosecco and burped loudly, attracting more laughter. “We’ll auction it. Five pounds for a hand job. Do I hear five pounds? No? Four fifty? Anyone?”

“I’ll give you a fiver to fuck off home,” yelled Sam’s father. “This place has gone down the bloody pan—last year we got the Bootleg Beatles!”

“Bootleg Beatles, darling?” asked Helen, hitching up her skirt. “Wouldn’t you prefer to stick your John in my Ringo?”

July 2015

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July 2015

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RECOGNITION Mahmuda does her best to respect the order of her employers and the conventions of their culture. But what happens when she has to keep a secret to protect someone close to her?

by Sanam Amin Every morning, from the moment she opens her eyes till the final slip into exhausted sleep, Mahmuda keeps calculating the expenses.

This month the rent would be 17,000 Taka. But starting next month it would be 25,000. Their incomes would remain the same: she would make 10,000 from tutoring, and Iqbal would bring home 35,000 of his 37,000 Taka salary. He would pay his phone bill, which would hopefully remain just under 1,000, and keep the rest for transport and the odd cigarette or cup of tea. Kajal’s salary would have to stay the same: 4,000 was not much to pay a maid these days, but Mahmuda feels she is lenient enough to make up for it. After all, Kajal had her own mobile phone, which Mahmuda gives her 100 every month for. And Kajal is allowed to chatter late at night or in the middle of her household chores. Hardly any other family would have allowed her that.

Mahmuda wakes just before her alarm went off, as she usually did. By now, her body clock knows to wake a few minutes before, and turn off the alarm before it can disturb Iqbal. She slips out of bed, and goes to knock on Kajal’s door before going to the bathroom. She knows Kajal won’t wake up until the second knock, after Mahmuda finishes with her Fajr prayers, but continues with the routine.

The routine is safe: it has been carefully developed and tweaked over the past four years. Only when it is finally time for children, could it possibly change. But they barely have the money for children right now. It would have to be done at some point, though; what else was there?

Iqbal’s mother will soon be up to read her Koran, sitting in bed, with the dim morning light only.

She won’t want to turn on the light, worrying about the electricity bill, even though they had it changed to an energy-saver bulb. Mahmuda knows at some point there will be a cost for her mother-in-law’s eye damage, but for now, she too would rather keep the electricity consumption down. Last month the bill was 2,313. Too much.

Mahmuda wonders, ever so briefly, about her own mother. Was this what she wanted Mahmuda’s life to be? Or perhaps these difficulties would bring more lecturing, more dismissals of Mahmuda’s competency.

Her mother’s death had been remarkably undramatic, for a woman who liked to insinuate and drop hints at every opportunity. Mahmuda had expected more fanfare, more fake pleas to the Almighty.

She hadn’t found her mother’s faith very convincing. There wasn’t much charity or kindness in what she said or did, despite the number of times she went through her prayer beads. Those beads are now in an oblong box in the wardrobe; Mahmuda wishes she had the courage to throw them away.

But if they are found in the garbage, she will be to blame for callousness or foolishness, or both; and besides, it isn’t clear to her if it is sinful or not. It might not be, but then pieces of tattered paper folded up and sealed with candle wax in small brass lockets are supposed to be holy, and helpful for aches and pains, and protection from evil.

Mahmuda does not often reflect on her parents or her childhood. There are stretches that had nothing too remarkable to remember, and then there are episodes that cannot be resolved or addressed, just dismissed to allow everyone to move forward. No regret, shame, resentment.

A carefully ironed and starched emotional balance.

July 2015

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FILLING IN/FILLING OUT: FITTING IN/FITTING OUT: THE DILEMMA OF THE DIASPORA TO DEFINE Raju Rage

Filling out an application.

I struggle.

This form will get me somewhere I want to be/make me someone I’m not/tell me who I am.

It claims my identity. gripping the ball point black tip ink pen hesitantly. to gain control. writing in CAPITALS because I’ve been instructed to. We do what we are told.

Gender mocks me as I attempt to glide the pen, holding onto it tighter than my masculinity or femininity, as I tick squares that force me into shape on the familiar white page. leaving some out/ tracing above them/ not knowing whether to place a tick or a cross.

Should I affirm a constructed self or cross myself out?

Trapped inside that straight sided box, I push at cracks to break out. so does the black ink. it bleeds outside edges. unpredictably streaks across the page. smudges. blemishes. stains my skin in affirmance of not belonging on this preconceived page.

I consider categories…

‘Asian’… contemplate between the options of….Indian…Pakistani…Bangladeshi. All 3 parts of a piece ripped apart by the British Raj. I read something written by someone else about myself. ‘there are 7-11 countries in South Asia, depending on who decides. 50 in Asia depending on whether you include Russia and Turkey: Russia—Mongolia—China—India—Sri Lanka—Maldives—Nepal—Bhutan—Bangladesh— Myanmar—Timor Leste—Brunei—Singapore—Taiwan—Phillipines—Japan—North Korea—South Korea—Pakistan—Afghanistan—Tajikistan—Kyrgyzstan—Uzbekistan— Turkmenistan—Georgia—Armenia—Azerbejan—Iran—Iraq—Syria—Lebanon—Oman— United Arab Emirates—Qatar—Bahrain—Kuwait—Turkey’ I summon ancestors from more than three who did not choose. Landless. Who did not question who they were and why and…

July 2015

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THOSE WE LEAVE BEHIND

by Mark Brown

“You were so beautiful,” she says. “When I first saw you I couldn’t stop looking at you.

Everyone said you were gay.”

This is their bed. Their marriage. The single lamp makes the room a warm tent.

She rubs her hand across the egg of his stomach, pushes her thumb into the crease at his waist, crunches the pad of his pubic hair with her palm.

“You were so thin, that hair and those lips and eyes.” She nuzzles into his bearded cheek.

“Not a whisker. When you first slept on our couch everyone asked ‘who’s that girl?’”

He does not say anything. The children are asleep. The cul de sac is quiet. “Remember when you used to wear makeup? Do you remember before we went out and that man in the pub bought you drinks all night? You were so polite to him, just cocking your head and listening.

Just like a girl.”

“I’m so glad we had Amanda. Dad couldn’t believe she was yours. ‘That puff’ he used to say.

I’m so glad you get along now. No one recognises you in the old photos.”

Kissing him, closing her eyes, she cannot see that he is crying.

July 2015

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July 2015 Faculty of Humanities, Languages & Social Science

Litro Magazine 32

THE SKIN I LIVE IN A personal take on one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most controversial and confrontational films.

by Scott Esposito In one of the final scenes of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, we see a beautiful young woman walking toward a car. She is wearing a gorgeous dress. When I watched her in that film I felt an utter envy, because I knew that she was inhabiting an intense longing that I could never, ever fulfill. Her chest was without a single hair. Her every curve was correct. She wore that dress with complete perfection. And she was not exactly a woman.

Almodóvar has called his film “a horror story without screams or frights.” I cannot doubt that it horrifies most viewers, but to me it was a fantasy. It tells the story of a plastic surgeon who avenges himself on a young man by turning him into a physically perfect woman. When I was younger, I would imagine similar things being done to my own body. Incapable of simply declaring my desire to look and feel like a girl, I could only imagine such freedom through duress.

In those past days when I lived in complete silence with my secret, I sometimes saw sitcoms and movies where a boy was dressed like a girl. In every single instance of such plotting the boy was compelled by circumstance to be feminized. I cannot recall ever once having seen the boy declare his wish to be a girl. It is peculiarly against the grain of masculinity to want to be made female.

This is what makes The Skin I Live In a horror film. As a young man, the protagonist is caddish and macho. Almodóvar makes much of the sci-fi technologies employed to reassign his gender, the costumey catsuit and sadomasochistic face-mask that he, now she, must wear as the entire body is re-engineered. It is indeed a horror: a man driven insane by depression and rage avenges himself by locking you into a room, repeatedly etherizing you, and cutting your body into a stereotype of female beauty. And yet I could not stop imagining that each new horror visited on this body was in fact one further step in the freeing of a desire.

What is so thorough about the doctor’s vision is that it is not only a physical act but a mental one. In order to continue to exist, his creation must submit to a feminine regime. Almodóvar shows us the calisthenics she must perform daily to keep the skin she has been fit into from stiffening. He shows us the satisfaction with which the doctor explains how she must penetrate her new vagina with a series of ever larger dildos, or else suffer her orifice closing.

These physical acts perpetuate the more horrifying mental violation: being made into a project kept within a locked room, your every need immaculately seen to, like the gothic ideal of the kept woman. We watch her tear to shreds the beautiful garments she has been given to wear, we see her mutinous thoughts etched into the wall of her cell, and we understand that her liberty will only be granted once she has lost any desire to make such acts of rebellion. Once even her thoughts have submitted to the doctor’s aim, only then will she be freed.

The most perverse thing is that this game is rigged: even her acts of rebellion can only be made on female terms. She can do no differently. There are no male moves left to her. The doctor has already navigated her into a corner from which her only means of a rebellion are a woman’s. The protagonist’s mind is, quite literally, a man’s mind trapped within a woman’s body, a woman’s environment, a woman’s world. And slowly but surely, that mind is losing its last vestiges of maleness.

July 2015

Litro Magazine 33

BITS OF ME A young trans woman mourns the death of her grandmother, and then deals with the ripple effects of being told to attend the funeral as a boy.

by Barney Walsh I spend most of the days between my nan dying and her funeral curled up in a ball on my bed, clutching my battered old teddy bear, hiding myself away from the world. I mean, I still get to classes—I’m doing A-levels, uni next year, politics and sociology—but I do call in sick to my part-time job stacking shelves.

Can’t be doing with it, it wouldn’t distract me enough from everything that’s wrong with my life right now. Because I’m dead upset, I’d loved my nan. She’d been the only one who’d truly accepted me as me. I remember once a few years ago, back when I was still trying to figure out who—or what—I was, when everyone thought I was just this weird shy lonely boy who’d probably turn out to be gay, I got beat up pretty bad at school. There were these lads who were always picking on me—calling me gayboy, poof, all that—and this time one of them shoved me from behind and I caught my forehead on the corner of a brick wall.

Blood poured out really quickly, right down my school shirt and into my trousers, but it didn’t make them reckon they’d gone too far, it just gave them the taste for it. I was never good at being a boy, didn’t know how to stand up for myself. They punched me a couple of times and I just curled up crying on the floor, hating myself and everything, till eventually they got bored and went away.

I went to my nan’s because it was close and I thought I could get her to not tell my parents, I couldn’t grass anyone up, it’d only make them hurt me worse. And it was while she was tut-tutting and fretting over me—putting ointment on the cuts, frozen peas on my bruising, swelling eye, not believing my story about having fallen—that I blurted it out: ‘I wish I was a girl’—and then went red and clapped my hand over my mouth because I couldn’t believe I’d said that aloud.

‘Why?’ Nan said gently. ‘Because then boys wouldn’t hurt you?’

‘I guess,’ I said—too scared to say everything I felt. I was already thinking that if she told anyone what I’d said I’d claim she must be going senile.

‘Well, I think you’d make a very good girl,’ is all Nan said, ‘if that’s who you find you are.’

Something like that, I can’t remember exact words. But she was really cool with it and never told anyone. And what she said came true: I’m not any more the lost and confused little boy everyone took me for—I never had been, really. I’m eighteen now, and no one who sees me would ever—well, hardly ever—take me for anything but the girl I’ve always deep down known that I am. *** And now it’s the day of Nan’s funeral and I’ve shut myself away in my bedroom. I don’t know what to do. There’s this man’s black suit and tie, with a white shirt, hanging on my wardrobe door. Because Nan dying was horrible enough, but then my mum’d hit me with her awful demand. Totally not what Nan would’ve wanted. She’d always been nice, saying I looked pretty or my outfit was cute or whatever, and later, even when she kind of was losing her July 2015

Litro Magazine 35

1–27 June 2015

Join the Kingston Writing School and the British Council at our third annual International Creative Writing Summer School, this year in Athens and Thessaloniki. www.britishcouncil.gr/events/international-creative-writing-summer-school-2015 www.kingston.ac.uk/writing/

July 2015

Litro Magazine 41

July 2015

Litro Magazine 42

SC H AV O FU AI LA LL LA R S BL HI E PS

Master’s in Philosophy AND ITS USES TODAY PROFESSOR ROGER SCRUTON FBA

October 2015 – September 2016 A one-year, London-based programme of ten evening seminars and individual research led by Professor Roger Scruton, offering examples of contemporary thinking about the perennial questions, and including lectures by internationally acclaimed philosophers.

Seminar-speakers for 2015/16 include: • Roger Scruton • Sebastian Gardner • Simon Blackburn • Raymond Tallis Each seminar takes place in central London and is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in discussion with the speaker.

The topics to be considered include consciousness, emotion, justice, art, God,

love and the environment. Examination will be by a research dissertation on an approved philosophical topic chosen by the student, of around 20,000 words. Guidance and personal supervision will be provided.

Others who wish to attend the seminars and dinners without undertaking an MA dissertation can join the Programme at a reduced fee as Associate Students.

Course enquiries and applications: Ms Claire Prendergast T: 01280 820204 E: claire.prendergast@buckingham.ac.uk

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

May 2015 July 2015

Litro The University of Buckingham is ranked in Magazine the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: 5 43 The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13