Litro148 teaser

FREE ISSUE 148

Featuring Lucy Kellett GC Perry Kevin Baker Patricia Morris Brad Ellis Michael Cohen Grazyna Plebanek Steph Cha

GOING HOME December 2015

Litro Magazine 52

www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

Kings, killers and kinetics See them all for 50% off with a National Art Pass Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery The Crime Museum Uncovered at the Museum of London Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture at Tate Modern December 2015

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#148 Going Home • December 2015

CONTRIBUTORS

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EDITOR’S LETTER COMIC STRIP

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>17 A NEW PLACE ON THE MAP >22 CHINESE HAMBURGERS >24 I HEART CONTAINERS >27 A MOTHER OF MY OWN

LISTING MENDACITIES

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GOING HOME AUTHOR Q&A

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#148 Litro Team Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto Online Editor

online@litro.co.uk

Fiction Editor Precious Williams precious.williams@litro.co.uk

Arts Editor Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk

Contributing Interviews Editor Mia Funk interviews@litro.co.uk

Arts & Lifestyle Contributor Isabel Prendergast artsandlifestyle@litro.co.uk

Contributing Editors at Large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer Laura Hannum Advertising Manager +44(0) 203 603 7944 sales@litro.co.uk

Story Sunday onlinefiction@litro.co.uk

General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971.

1-15 Cremer Street, Studio 21.3 London E2 8HD Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.

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December 2015

Litro Magazine 6

Contributors

Litro Magazine • #148 • Going Home • December 2015

Kevin Baker

Lucy Kellet Lucy Kellett is a London based author who also works in advertising.

Gc Perry’s stories have appeared in Litro, Shooter, Open Pen, Prole, Fractured West, Neon and elsewhere. He lives in London.

Kevin Baker is a writer and musician from the UK. His work has appeared in Litro, Adbusters, and CHEAP POP, among others. He's currently working on a novel.

Patricia L. Morris Patricia L. Morris is an art school dropout and a Harvard grad.

She is a writer, photographer, and a lover of containers.

December 2015

Litro Magazine 7

Brad Ellis Brad Ellis lives in central Illinois and recently graduated from Eastern Illinois University. He has published poetry in Periphery and won multiple university awards for his critical essays as well as a screenplay; this is his first short fiction publication. He likes to take pictures of cars in his spare time, and dreams of one day traveling to London.

Michael Cohen Michael Harris Cohen is a recipient of the New Century Writer’s Scholarship from Zoetrope: All-Story, a Fulbright grant, fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Artist’s Residency, The Blue Mountain Center, and the Modern Grimmoire Literary Prize as well as Mixer Publishing’s Sex, Violence and Satire prize.

Jeanie Tomanek

Grażyna Plebanek Steph Cha Grazyna Plebanek is a writer and journalist. She is the author of the highly acclaimed and best selling novels Box of Stilettos, Girls from Portofino, and A Girl Called Prystupa. In 2011 Plebanek was awarded the Literary Prize Ziote Sowy for her contribution to Poland abroad.

Steph Cha is the author of “Follow Her Home”, “Beware Beware” and “Dead Soon Enough.”

Her writing has appeared in the L.A. Times, The L.A. Review of Books, and Trop Magazine.

A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, she lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California.

Jeanie Tomanek’s representations of female archetypes and womencentric allegories most often feature a bald pale Everywoman as protagonist. Her work is held in public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Australia. More information can be found on her website: www.jeanietomanek.com December 2015

Litro Magazine 8

#148 • Going Home • December 2015

EDITOR'S LETTER call home—the place you was raised— then you return some years later. That home becomes a home—because of the shared memories of events—the laughter’s the tears, conversations, news—that took place with family and friends. It’s these shared experiences that gives a sense of meaning to the place we call home.

Litro, the magazine for the general reader dedicated to short stories, ideas, the people who make them and those just starting to put pen to paper would like to thank all our readers new and old who wrote to us last month—some where shameful personal plugs, some due to various Acts of law—have had to be omitted, though we liked them nonetheless but on the whole a big thumbs up from you all, you can read some of these on pages 11&12.

When you leave the home you was raised and grew up in, that home is missed. Forgotten at a certain extent. Remembered every time someone relates something to it.

This month in Litro #148 we explore the notion of Going Home—and what it means to us. Is it a familiar physical space?

A refuge? A feeling? A state of mind? Or is home actually to be found in another human being—maybe your partner, your parents? How do you know when you have found it?

Our cover art this month is ‘Rising’ by American self taught artist Jeanie Tomanek—‘Rising’ focuses on the idea of death and the final journey to wherever that leads, often the thought of going home.

The collection of stories this month though all told through different lenses, all give tales of feeling at home, of discovering/rediscovering home giving varying degrees of answers to what home can mean to us.

The concept of home is locked in our memories. Continuing changes we experience in life makes it infeasible to remove memories of one’s past. Especially when you have been absent from the place you

December 2015

Litro Magazine 9

We open the issue with A Mother of My Own, by Lucy Kellet, a story in which a young adoptee ponders her true identity— in-doing so she realises her home is life that has been created by her adopted parents, finding her home in these parents.

Polish writer, Grazyna Plebanek's, personal essay Going Home—tells of Plebanek’s time spent between the place she calls home Brussels and the country she was born Poland.

Finally in our author conversation, well In GC Perry’s, A New Place on The Map, a not so much a conversation but a quick father re-visits his fractured family and finds fire round of four questions—this month his home in the family he is separated from. is with award winning Korean/US writer Kevin Baker takes us to the Far East with his Steph Cha.

story Chinese Hamburgers, the smells and Wishing you all a happy and pleasant bustle of the Chinese markets the famil- journey home for the holidays—where iar physical space gives the character his ever home is for you! meaning of home.

Until 2016, Inspired by a BBC documentary following a year in the life of a container ship, Patricia Morris’ I Heart Containers, tells the story of these well-travelled containers and the untold stories and secrets they contain.

Brad Ellis’ Listings, tells the tale of a couple desperately seeking the perfect home, told through the eyes of an estate agent.

In Mendacities, Michael Cohen gives a dark tale of a woman who imagines murdering her husband and reveals the paths our minds travel to find our way home.

Eric Akoto Editor in Chief

December 2015

Litro Magazine 10

LETTERS PAGE Please tweet @LitroMagazine or send to: 1-15 Cremer Street, 21.3 Hoxton E2 8HD

Trafalgar Studios ‫@‏‬TrafStudios Trafalgar Studios Retweeted Litro Magazine Nov 17 Brilliant review for #FourMinutesTwelveSeconds from @ LitroMagazine! #mustsee

Julia Bell ‫@‏‬JuliaBell Nov 22 Nice work @birkbeck_arts MA student @FirebirdN4 in @LitroMagazine http://www.litrony.com/2015/11/ attempts/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_ medium=twitter&utm_ source=socialnetwork …

Aerogramme Writers ‫@‏‬A_WritersStudio Nov 26 Between now and Christmas @PenguinRandom is donating one book to a child in need for every tweet using #giveabook

Alain de Botton ‫@‏‬alaindebotton Dec 1 Change begins when the fear of not acting at all at last outstrips the paralysing fear of making a mistake.

Litro Magazine ‫@‏‬LitroMagazine Dec 7 Great to see @nicholas_hogg's #Tokyo make @ahmpreston's 2015 list in @GuardianBooks. We interviewed Hogg in August: http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/08/darklight-an-interview-with-nicholas-hogg/ …

December 2015

Litro Magazine 11

Dear Editor, How much would it be to place this advert in your magazine: Books for Sale For lists contact E . FRANCIS 47 Nansen Road, Saltley B8 3JP ENGLAND Yours Faithfully E. Francis

Dear E. Francis, As a literary magazine—and like all great literary magazines before us—it is our job to struggle with bills. We realize you have written to us in the past—but ask you to contact the office by phone or email and we can work together to produce an advert for you—I guess we’ve just advertised you free.

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Enrol on the Children’s Fiction Workshop with award-winning author Sophia Bennett.

Learn how to improve your craft and make your work stand out with City’s new 10-week short course launching October 2015.

cityshortcourses.com/writing December 2015

engaging challenging rewarding

Litro Magazine 13

@writingmatters1

The leTTerpress shAkespeAre

A publishing lAndmArk All of Shakespeare’s works printed letterpress in individual leather-bound volumes. ¶ since the first folio in 1623 there have been countless editions of shakespeare’s plays, yet none surpasses the restrained beauty of the letterpress shakespeare – a project that has taken The Folio society, britain’s leading publisher of fine books, eight years to complete. ¶ individual editions of all of shakespeare’s works, graced by pure and elegant typographic design, printed letterpress on thick, mould-made paper, and bound in leather with hand-marbled boards. ¶ Only 300 copies of each volume of the letterpress shakespeare are available to order.

To find out more go to www.foliosociety.com/letterpress or email letterpress@foliosociety.com

LITRO COMIC STRIP How to Enjoy Doom

by Steven Appleby and Art Lester

LITRO | LITRO 48 | 48

49 | LITRO 49 | LITRO

December 2015

Litro Magazine 15

A MOTHER OF MY OWN An adoptee ponders her true identity

by Lucy Kellett

Coral

slipped past the open door of her father’s study before he could ask what she was doing. She breathed out. Excitement fluttered through her as she looked at the envelope in her hand, the chipped varnish on her nails glinting against the paper. The curls and swoops of her handwriting made the institutional address feel whimsical, full of promise.

Her father’s bald head shone in the lamplight, just visible through the slats in the bannister. He was probably typing his sermon for Sunday’s service on his Dell PC, a sensible computer for a sensible man. It was in one of the MDF drawers next to him that she had found the address.

From the gloom of the downstairs hallway, she emerged onto Marbury Road, each house identical to the one she stepped out of, purposefully, red hair streaming behind her. She marvelled at how people who hadn’t grown up here navigated this labyrinth of streets, each house a carbon copy of the one next to it. But Baxby suited her parents down to the ground. Except they weren’t her parents. And this was what the letter was about.

The sole piece of evidence of her life before being adopted was a photo of her as a newborn, that photo of her in a plastic hospital cot, the cone of her tiny head covered in red hair. It was the hair that must have given her real mother the idea for her name. And her name was all she had of her mother, all she could hold on to.

For Harold and Dawn, her adoptive parents, it was enough to live in Baxby, to watch their BBC drama on Thursday evenings, to get takeaway on Friday nights. Trips to London were rare and they never went abroad, though they could afford to. But it wasn’t enough for Coral.

Coral believed in magic, in wordless, airborne things. She had tried to explain this to Harold once, things like how photos could never truly capture people, because people were transient, only existing in time, like moments, different from one second to the next. Though afterwards she wished she hadn’t opened her mouth. He would never understand.

She slipped the envelope into the letter box and let it drop. Finally she was sixteen, legally within her rights to order her adoption records here in Scotland, able to act on the thoughts of her mother that burned inside her, a fire that could never be put out.

This was about being known. Known by someone who could meet her eye and nod, and in that nod for things to be implicit. I know exactly what you mean, that nod would say, that is what life is about. We share secrets because we are alike. We march to a different drum, dance to a different beat, and our hearts sing along to a tune that others don’t hear. That nod would say we see beauty that others don’t, so much beauty that we don’t know what to do with it. We try to explain it in a picture or a poem or even a song. And people call us unfocused—teachers, elders—but all we want to do is express that beauty, share it somehow. Her mother would have that sparkle in her eye. She was sure of it.

December 2015

Litro Magazine 17

A NEW PLACE ON THE MAP A man re-visits his fractured family

by GC Perry

The

car rolls to a halt and I put the hand brake on, knock the gear lever into neutral and turn the engine off. The radio cuts out. I can see the telly through the living room window. Unknown men and women dressed in oversized, furry costumes cavort across the screen, transfixing my children. I see the back of my daughter’s head, my son in profile. They are still.

In the hallway—the letters. It reminds me of when we split up. Living separately, but still corresponding. Together. Apart. I had forgotten she has such beautiful handwriting.

The letters—a warning sign.

She’s in the kitchen. On the laptop. Doesn’t look up when I enter.

‘Kids okay?’ I ask, trying to lift my voice, the way telesales men sound when they call me at work.

‘Fine,’ she says, layering this simple word of positive affirmation with something quite different.

‘Good day? Write some letters?’

‘Well, you’ve seen them, so yes, obviously!’

I go to the living room. They’re watching an animated cartoon now. They don’t know I’m there. The cartoon is funny, but they don’t laugh. I remember I didn’t do something I should’ve at work and for a moment consider whether I need to email or phone someone, or whether it can wait. My son farts. He and his sister chuckle, not taking their eyes from the screen. They still don’t know I’m there. I like watching them.

The letters are addressed to the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Culture, the Mayor of London and the BBC. In the kitchen, I put the kettle on. ‘Tea?’ She nods.

I’m not sure how to frame the question: how to avoid the defensive reaction. ‘What are the letters about?’

She screws her lips. Looks at me for the first time. ‘You never take my projects seriously.’

‘I’m interested.’

‘A maze,’ she says. ‘London needs a maze. A landmark maze. The kind of maze that people can have an experience in. The kind of maze that no city yet boasts. A maze which will do for the labyrinth what the London Eye did for Ferris wheels.’

‘A maze?’ I say. I try to sound interested. Intrigued. I’m not good at this type of thing. Even to my ears, I sound incredulous. Since the kids and then her illness, there have been numerous episodes like this. A kind of mania for something. A reaching out. Reaching for something beyond her kids and her house, and me.

‘Do you have to rubbish everything I do? I’ve got ideas. Vision. Imagine it: the world’s greatest maze. A landmark. A destination. A new place on the map.’

December 2015

Litro Magazine 22

CHINESE HAMBURGERS An essay about adopted homes, and how places change with time

by Kevin Baker

I

arrived in Beijing at the height of the summer. The view from the taxi’s window was familiar—there were a few more cars than before, but dust still covered everything, reducing new Audis and antique VWs to the same metal ghosts.

My driver was singing along to a love ballad on the radio, his falsetto ruined by cheap tobacco. I smiled from where I sat in the back seat, my shirt already soaked through with sweat. So much had happened in the three years since I’d left China, but it melted away when the plane touched down, as if the flight had travelled through time.

In one of those coincidences suggesting cosmic design,The Carpenters came on the radio with Yesterday Once More.

“Very good,” the driver said, pointing at the radio, and smiling back at me.

“Yes,” I said, leaning forward and putting my face next to the grimy Perspex divider.

“Very good.”

I was heading back to the small city of Xingtai, where I’d taught English for a year at a university. At the time, I hadn’t had the slightest inclination to stay on for longer.

Those 12 months had burnt out my circuits and left me completely frazzled. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go home to England; I’d just wanted to get away from China.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps even just a few months after getting back, I’d started to feel a strange sensation of home-sickness. Just as you only feel a mosquito’s bite once it’s flown, China had got under my skin without me even being aware of it. I watched a documentary set in Beijing and smelt the streets they showed on screen, heard the voices in the background calling out for me. I felt exiled, as if China was a second home that I’d abandoned.The longing to return built steadily, until one summer I found myself with three months of leisure and enough money for a plane ticket. I messaged my old employers, asking about the possibility of them letting me stay in my old apartment. I was astonished when they agreed. After so long, I was going back.

I dozed on the train from Beijing West, thinking about all the things that had made my life in Xingtai. I’d kept in contact with my co-teachers, but my student’s subsequent lives were a mystery. The last time I’d heard from one of them they’d been working in a factory in Shenzhen and were expecting a baby. I felt a little pang of guilt, though it seemed natural that we’d fallen out of touch. We’d all known that my presence in their lives was temporary, and we’d made the most of it while it was there.

What I missed most was the place, especially the area around my apartment. There had been a market a minute’s walk away from my front door, and it was there that I felt most at home. I could still see all the familiar faces—the gap toothed grandma selling knock off clothes, the guy in an old army jacket ladling black broth into plastic cups, the bicycle repair man surrounded by broken pedals, the tailor and her Soviet machine; a whole cast of characters acting out their lives in a muddy alley, offering all the services anyone could need for a pocketful of change. It all came back in a haze, December 2015

Litro Magazine 24

I HEART CONTAINERS Well-travelled containers contain untold stories and secrets

by Patricia Morris

The

train movie is stock-still as I sit, and sip. My first-coffee eyes focus above the window’s transom. If it wasn’t for the glass, I could touch the stencilled white letters T R I T O N on the corrugate wall of the shipping container. This sienna container is stacked on a rusting blue one with spray-painted graffiti ‘I <3’.

Each container is a jumbo Lego brick with its own number, like my passport: BA 27518131.

In the hollow of the brick, each hidden product has its own trace identification number.

It’s amazing to consider where the well-used container has been—how many miles overland, air and sea it travelled and what it carried. How the goods made a difference to factory-workers who produced them, citizens who purchased them or shippers who transported them? If you hammer its metal walls, the sounds and echoes would tell tales.

Burrard Inlet, North-Shore Mountains, and the Port-of-Vancouver frame this face of globalization. The back and forth of urban living requires no lawn-mowing.

Without travel ease, my life might have been circumscribed by the view outside my windowpane. These containers became standardized and circulated the globe like hormones that pulse through the body. We both ‘came of age’ in the sixties. When the diesel engines fire, we scatter the world. *** December 2015

Litro Magazine 27

LISTING Desperately seeking the perfect home

by Brad Ellis

Deborah Hannily

fought the urge to scream when her client Paul stepped out of his car and said “I thought I said nothing out in the country.”

She wanted to scream because he wanted to stay close to the city, but his girlfriend Brittany wanted to be secluded. He didn’t want to live in a country-style ranch house, but she said it would be her ideal home. He wanted each room to be separate, but she wanted an open-concept living space. Their wish list looked like an argument put on paper.

“I know what you said,” Deborah replied, stepping away from her own car,“but you’d be surprised how much this house meets both of your must-haves.”

Brittany stepped out of her side of the car, the wind catching her dirty blond hair. She tucked her waving locks behind her ear and crossed her arms as she ventured onto the leaf-covered front lawn. “I like it,” she said. “I think it looks really quaint.”

“Well of course you like it,” Paul said, not taking any steps away from the car; he even kept the driver-side door propped open, perhaps hoping he’d be able to jump in and drive away at a moment’s notice. “This place looks right up your alley. Did you notice how long of a drive it was to get here? It’s at least forty minutes away from downtown.”

“It’s not like it matters. Whether it’s a five-minute drive or a fifty-minute drive, you’d still be out until two in the morning.”

Deborah rolled her eyes. These were the types of jabs Paul and Brittany had been throwing at each other throughout all twelve house tours they’d been on. If they were left in each other’s company for more than two minutes, one of them would insult the other. A couple more houses, and she was sure someone was going to start swinging.

And, personally, she was hoping Paul would be at the receiving end of it.

“Okay, you two,” Deborah said. “Before we get started: yes, it’s country-style and I know that bothers you Paul, but it’s thirty thousand below your budget so you two can decorate it with whatever style you like. Also, even though it’s a long drive from downtown, if you notice, we’re in a pretty cosy neighbourhood out here, so you’ll still get that neighbour-to-neighbour connection you were wanting.”

Paul gazed at the houses surrounding him, all similarly built ranch houses from the early part of the century, and grimaced. “I’m not sure if these are the kinds of neighbours I was looking for. I was thinking more…young people. People who’d want to go out clubbing without putting in their going-out teeth.”

He smiled to himself. Brittany shook her head. Deborah pretended to enjoy the joke to please him, but not so much that Brittany thought she found it funny.

“Look, before you judge this place completely by its appearance, let’s take a look inside, shall we? And again, remember that any style problems you have can be remodelled.”

Brittany was already halfway through the front door by the time Paul finally stepped away from the car, sighing.The wind picked up again, shuffling the dead leaves on the ground, as Deborah led him through the entryway and closed the door behind them.

December 2015

Litro Magazine 30

MENDACITIES A woman imagines murdering her husband and reveals the paths our minds travel to find our way home

Alice’s

by Michael Cohen

letter came through the mail slot the same day I murdered my husband again. In fact, the soft slap of the letter tumbling onto the floor followed so closely after the last breath of my spouse that, for a fat moment, I thought it was the sound of his soul exiting his body. I am not religious. However I do have an excitable imagination, allowing me the momentary belief in a soul, pruned of any religion, squirming out of my husband’s sealed skin and plopping to the floor, frog like, before making its mind up as to which pole to set its journey by. Stepping over my husband’s corpse, gingerly working my way toward the door as if his soul were as invisible and delicate as a lost contact lens, I retrieved her letter.

I recognized her handwriting on the envelope, the bold script that used to adorn all those notes on my door in college.

“Gone to the Rat for a pint of philosophy. Care to come?…A.” Or if she was already full of philosophy: “There’s a bomb hidden somewhere in my room. Come down and help find it before it explodes…A.” Alice was English. Alice was a lesbian and it had been Alice who had taught me how to lie. She’d said that dykes and fags were better than anyone at it since their whole formative years were an exercise in deception. “Sometimes their whole lives,” she’d said.

“We live in mendacities, cities where the streets are paved with bullshit.”

I was still turning the envelope over in my hands when I heard the creaking in his study.

“Anything interesting come?”

“Just more catalogues, dear.”

Alice had said that three uncorrected lies to any person meant you could never have a real relationship with them. She never explained why one or two was acceptable or what she meant by “real.” My husband and I passed the three mark a decade ago and only a few of any value have been corrected.

One was after I’d transferred three long blond hairs from one of the pillows of our bed into a lemon-carrot soup I served him that night. My husband is a tenured professor at the University of Ohio. He’s a great hit at faculty parties for his skill in producing quotations to suit the moment, particularly in plucking from the Romantics, whom he dislikes but is still compelled to teach on occasion.

That dinner he’d pulled one of the hairs from his teeth and held it taut between his hands as though he were going to describe a fish. Instead, he’d produced a quote from Blake before folding the oiled blond hair into his napkin and finishing his soup.

I’m a brunette and, truth be told, something of winter has touched my curls. In my own rule book an unforced truth almost cancels out an uncorrected lie. You certainly wouldn’t have pictured the gray unless I’d let on about it. Very well, yes, I began our relationship badly. I didn’t murder my husband. He’s alive, pushing out pipe smoke December 2015

Litro Magazine 37

GOING HOME

by Grażyna Plebanek

I

need to buy tea.

I land at the Okecie airport in Warsaw. From the front of my ginger coat I brush off the crumbs of a “Prince Polo” bar, a bite of Polishness, which the airline served us just before landing. “Prince Polo”, the taste of my childhood, brings back the memory of the voice of my grandmother. To buy the bars, grandma had to stand in long queues. As she had to for everything in that Poland, which one was not allowed to leave. The Okecie airport served mainly communist officials, they used it for trips to “brotherly countries” (a favourite propaganda term).

Until one day my grandma took off from it too. It was a trip to Sweden and Britain organised for former prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I waved to her from the airport terrace, the roar of the engines buzzing in my stomach. The plane tiptoed along the runway like a ballerina from the Bolshoi Theatre, began to glide, accelerate, and offfffff it went…

Tea I need to buy.

My coat absorbed the impersonal smell of the plane's air conditioning system, even though the flight between Brussels and Warsaw took less than two hours. I bought the coat in Stockholm. When I moved there 15 years ago, my grandmother said: “It is quiet there, safe, good for children”. About Britain, she said: “They have these little houses there”. “Like the ones I used to draw when I was a kid?” I asked.

Before we moved into a concrete bloc of flats, we used to live in a house called a Finnish house. A compound of these yellow houses was built in the Warsaw quarter of Ochota by the Russians, it was a gift from a brotherly nation. Ochota is close to the Okecie airport, but I do not recall planes flying overhead. I only remember the one that grandma took.

To buy tea I need I was wrong. I open the cupboard in my Warsaw home and I see—there is tea! I forgot I run out of it in my Brussels home. Polish tea is strong, it's called Yunan, I have been drinking it since childhood. A tea-drinkers house—that's the house of my childhood. We, from Eastern Europe, drank coffee only in the office. At home we drank tea—for sorrow, for a stomachache, for a hangover, or to welcome guests. Dregs of tea leaves bulging at the bottom of a glass—in our home tea was served in glasses—were the foundation of everyday life. “Shall I make you some tea?” Grandma would ask rhetorically when I returned from school. “Forget it, she can make it herself,” my mother would admonish her. But grandma was already putting glasses on the kitchen counter, lighting up the stove, heating up the water in a kettle with a whistle and putting dried tea leaves into a brown steamer.

In Belgium, tea is called an “infusion”. It is a slap in the face for my tea-drinker's identity.

In my Brussels home, we drink tea brought from Poland or from Britain—countries of small houses.

December 2015

Litro Magazine 45

LITRO Q&A Conversation with Steph Cha

by Precious Williams Steph Cha is a Korean-American feminist crime novelist based in Los Angeles. The LA Times has described her as possibly “the world’s only author of Korean American feminist noir.” Her new novel, “Dead Soon Enough” (Minotaur Books) is out now.

Q3 You graduated from Q1 How long did it take Yale Law School. How you to write your first novel, “Follow Her Home”? has your legal experience I finished the first draft while I was still affected your writing? at Yale Law School and by the time I graduated I was determined to pursue the glamorous life of a writer. So, I moved home with my parents and spent days writing and querying in bed as I had no desk in my room.

I’m a lawyer too but just not really practicing these days. I have a lot of respect for the profession and think it’s really important and powerful, and maybe that’s why I’ve had a few lawyer villains in my books.

I’d be the first to admit that my life has been exceedingly easy, but, in relative terms, this short part of it was pretty hard For six months after the bar exam, I spent a lot of time wondering if I’d put all of my eggs in just the stupidest basket.

Q4 You’ve been described as the world’s “only Korean-American feminist noir novelist.” How does Q2 Can you tell me being Korean-American a bit about your and female inform your writing process? books and your career as The expectation in the mystery world is a crime writer: a book a year, which is pretty crazy. My

As a woman of colour there’s a constant barrage of reminders that I am different from the white male norm. But I enjoy writing against this background. It gives me a lot to talk about. Some of the richest crime fiction in recent years has come from female crime writers and crime writers of colour, I think because darkness really flourishes in pockets of marginalised experience.

first book took me over a year and a half each, with another two years or so for editing. It took some adjustment to get to a place where I could bang out a manuscript in a year, but I am there, more or less. I've had to arrange everything else in my life to accommodate my writing life shifts, prices go up and it will no longer be a gateway for families like mine.

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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

December 2015

Litro The University of Buckingham is ranked in Magazine the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: 49 The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13

Have you ever had anything published?

If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve written a book or had an article published, the Authorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 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 December 2015

Litro Magazine 50

Enter the IGGY and Litro Young Writers’ Prize for a chance to win £1000 and see your story published.

Inspiring, encouraging and acknowledging the creativity of young people is a common goal for the online educational community IGGY and Litro Magazine, who have joined together for the sixth year of the IGGY and Litro Young Writers’ Prize. This competition is open to creative 13-18 year olds all over the world.

The winner will receive a £1,000 cash prize and will see their story be published on IGGY.net and in Litro Magazine.

All eligible entrants will receive free IGGY membership. Go to www.iggy.net/writingprize for more information and to submit your entry.

Competition opens: 2 November 2015 Submission deadline: 8 February 2016 www.IGGY.net www.litro.co.uk

December 2015

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