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Brian Baker on The Barrow Rapture

29/6/2015

 
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I’d been to Barrow once before, in the long summer of 1995. I’d shared a Liverpool student flat with a friend who’d grown up in the town, and one weekend we took the train to stay with his family. I remember the beauty of the journey from Lancaster to Barrow, taking in Morecambe Bay and the mountains. I remember the dusty walk across the hot August town from the train station. I remember the warmth of his family’s welcome, and the red welt on my arm after a Cumbrian horse-fly, a clegg, took a bite. But we had really travelled through Barrow, because my friend had actually grown up in a tiny hamlet outside the town, a place called Paradise.

Coming back, nearly 20 years later on a grey Spring morning for a walk around the town with Jenn and Beth, made me recognise the similarities with my own upbringing in Thames-side Essex. The salt marshes and tidal muds of Walney reminded me of Benfleet, Canvey Island and Pitsea; pillboxes marshalled the landscape; the black water of deep-water channels and the call of gulls were strangely familiar. Towns at the end of the railway, a terminus, places where no-one passes through on the way to somewhere else, because after here, there’s nowhere else to go – unless, of course, you are on the way to Paradise.

Through writing a critical book on Iain Sinclair, and beginning a project with an old friend from home, I’d been trying to come to terms with growing up in South Essex, a place I couldn’t wait to leave. The journey to Barrow, to the streets of a planned town, to big skies and grey-green water, to the smell of silt and salt, was in some ways a return. To think myself, or rather to feel myself into that place, a town I didn’t really know, was a chances to draw lines back to my own teenage years and a place I now visited infrequently, to see my own family.

Doors opened. And not just to my own past or relationship to Essex and to Barrow, but in this shared writing and imagining of the story of The Barrow Rapture. Ideas, images, locations emerged as we wrote, and Beth drew and painted. Sometimes I was surprised by what appeared on the page as I wrote myself.

Stories, I suppose, are both personal and shared, coming to life as the circuit between the text and the reader. The form of The Barrow Rapture emphasises that process of transmission and creation. In collaborating with Jenn, Tom and Beth, I’ve discovered how a project like The Barrow Rapture is both personal and shared, and in its transmissions gains a kind of unexpected life and shape, and I hope it continues to do so.

Brian Baker
http://sciencefiction365.blogspot.co.uk

Meeting Edges

27/5/2015

 
Until May last year my experience of Barrow-in-Furness had been fleeting, rushed changes at the train station. Sprinting through the underpass with too much luggage to make a connection north up the west coast of Cumbria or south to Manchester and beyond, always transitory, somewhere I needed to pass through to get somewhere else. Over the last decade or so it has become a familiar and personal non-place to me, missing my connection, waiting in the sparse entrance, an icy sea wind cutting through winter layers – always somewhere I travelled alone to visit the people I loved.

Barrow is situated in an isolated jutting peninsula on the North West coast, a purpose-built industrial town sandwiched between power stations, off-shore wind farms and the Cumbrian fells, partially surrounded by sinking sands shifting between Morecambe Bay and the Ravenglass estuary.

For my first real visit to Barrow last spring, I didn’t take the train, I drove from further up the Cumbrian coast, south over the barren moorland of Corney Fell, where on reaching the highest point I had a clear view of the Irish Sea, the wind farms and the horizon blurring land, sea and sky. All the way to Barrow.

On the approach into the town there is a sense of industrial layers. A still functioning Victorian brickworks on the northern outskirts, the modern seemingly unpopulated cuboid industrial estates and leviathan sheds rising out of the centre, mocking the brick terraced houses at their base and imitating the mountain landscape.

Heading out of the town towards the docks, the roads are wide and straight, it becomes difficult to tell which warehouse is in use, which gas tower, which hulking metal structure. Piers and pillboxes on the beach, stumps that would have propped up a bridge look like ancient monolithic monuments.

I took photographs to try to remember colour, structures and where things were in relation to the sea or the mountains, but the Barrow landscape documents itself. Its memory washes up on the beaches and seeps out from under flaking paintwork, badly made facades or fading signage. After walking for hours, I stopped taking photographs and instead began to absorb.

The work for The Barrow Rapture became black, white, grey and yellow. Black and white like the drawings for a graphic novel. Grey for the hazy horizon and concrete architecture. Yellow, for the gorse bushes by the docks, for the edging on the train station steps, for the seagull’s beak and for the line of sunlight between sea and sky. Fading grey, yellow, grey. The landscape becoming more and more yellow. The yellow becoming symbolic of something more spiritual and ethereal. Barrow becoming a medium between this world and another.

And so the story begins and ends in transition, as we all do, with a voyage and a crossing. The protagonist steps off the train at Barrow-in-Furness station and walks through the underpass alone.

Beth Ward

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Curious Tales in conversation with... Barrow-In-Furness

18/5/2015

 
Maybe it's strange to think of writing as a kind of conversation. People have an idea, I think, of writers alone in garrets, scribbling away in self imposed isolation. It can be like that sometimes, for some writers, some of the time - maybe - but all the work we do at Curious Tales has conversation at its core. In fact, that's one of the ways we can tell if an idea one of us has is something we'd want to work on together. Does it involve collaboration and participation? Does the work itself engage with other forms - art, web design - and with other writers and artists? Our ghost story anthologies are always in conversation with another writer - a way of looking backwards and acknowledging our influences, as well as looking forward and attempting to give time-honoured traditions a fresh twist or new perspective. Bus Station: Unbound was a giant conversation with a building - part imagined, and part real - and the book itself is a strange, otherworldly conversation between itself and the reader, who is able to control the direction the story takes. 

For The Barrow Rapture, Brian, Tom, Beth and I started a long conversation with Barrow itself. We made trips to the place by car and train. We were researching, I suppose. Not like scientists do - we didn't have strict research questions and I don't think any of us turned up with a hypothesis - but we were, on those first visits, listening and making lists of questions the landscape prompted us to ask. We let ourselves be led by our noses, by getting lost, by turning up at the wrong cafe by accident. I took a left when I should have taken a right, ended up in front of a closed spiritualist church, and started wondering about conversations between the living and dead, between the present and the absent, between the embodied and the remembered. I started there.

We walked until our feet were sore. What does it feel like to be here, in this town? What does it smell like? What does the light look like in the late afternoon, and what do the shapes the shadows of those buildings make remind us of? What stories leak out of pub doorways, or are washed in by the tide? What plots and narratives are suggested by the way we move through the town, the way the roads siphon the traffic through the main and residential areas? What hidden histories and slowly evolving conflicts are embedded in this landscape: the thickening fog, the sea as grey as a draining board, the seagull shit caked on window ledges, thick as concrete?

We were in conversation with each other too  - over email, and in some informal workshops we held to discuss the work. It felt important to tread lightly - to be guests in the town, and guests to each other's imaginative interpretations of the journey we'd shared. Plot would emerge if it wanted to. Voice would take care of itself if we listened hard enough and chose the words with humility. As a writer, I'm a control freak and giving myself up to unknowing, learning to respond gently and to edge slowly into the fog was hard on the brain and good for the ego. We wrote our own sections of the stories independently, editing in response to conversations about tone, style and theme and editing again as the first versions of Beth's amazing artworks started to appear.

And a character did emerge from the early morning mist - thank god. She was alone and listening to the town, like we were. Someone curious, someone looking for something in particular. Someone with a backpack and an even heavier burden. In one version of the story, she starts with a visit to the spiritualist church because her mum used to take her there. It was her safe place. The place to go back to and wait if she got lost. We developed a design for the website too - one which would allow Beth Ward's haunting and evocative interpretations of the buildings and landscapes  take centre stage and work with the writing to create mood and tension and a design that would recreate or dramatise this sense of open ended exploration, of listening, of motivated but routeless wandering.

The architecture of The Barrow Rapture is fairly simple. The reader makes a series of decisions, deciding which landmarks to visit, and which to avoid. There are many routes and combinations through the work, just as there are many ways to explore a town - even a small one - on foot. Some of the locations are real, some imaginary, and some an amalgam of the two. There are several places to end the journey. And the reader can come home again - and find the town slightly different - as many times as she likes.

Jenn Ashworth
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Review from the Netherlands

12/12/2014

 
Generally speaking, we’re not ones to toot our own trumpet. We’ve had some nice reviews for our two books: we tend to re-post them on Facebook or Twitter for all to see but leave it at that.

This week, however, we heard tell of a review which we felt compelled to re-post here. Anna van Gelderen very kindly posted this review on her blog of our previous collection of Christmas ghost stories, The Longest Night. The interest twist? It’s in Dutch! One of the most heartening things about sending out copies of our new book, Poor Souls’ Light, is seeing it travel far and wide: to Germany, America and Australia.

So, with the help of Google translate and some careful re-phrasing on our part (although I do think one of Google’s original phrases, ‘the cat is so soggy against you’, describes winter perfectly), here is said review:
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It's that time of year that the days seem to be without light. Outside the birds are frozen to the roofs; the snow pursues you through the streets and buries your car; the wind whistles through your central heating pipes; somewhere a window that is not quite properly closed clatters; the cats are clinging to you as closely as they can and you have a big pot of hot tea within reach. In short, you're in the mood for a collection of contemporary horror stories written especially for this time of year.

Last December Curious Tales, the British writer collective (the Booker-nominated Alison Moore is the best known amongst them), published a bundle of original short stories, drawing inspiration from this darkest time of the year. They are all around fifteen pages long and each story begins with an intriguing black and white illustration by artist Beth Ward. The book, published in limited edition, was published with great care and each copy is signed and numbered by one of the authors. Although they are inspired by old masters in the genre, such as A.N. Wilson, they remain quite clearly modern stories.

'Winter Closing' by Alison Moore takes place in the former home of a deceased writer which is now a museum dedicated to her. It is an unpleasant place, but a fan of the author tirelessly gives tours, until December 21 when the house closes for the winter and something goes awry.
     
The story of Emma Jane Unsworth, entitled 'In', is oppressive and initially puzzling. But if you read it carefully, a protagonist emerges who finds herself overwrought and on the verge of snapping, driven crazy by the rattling of her garden gate.
     
The contribution of Richard Hirst, 'Drums at Cullen plays with a few standard elements of the genre but in an original way: an isolated country house, a woman who seems to have risen from the dead. Deliciously creepy.
     
'Bedtime' Tom Fletcher is set in a steadily deteriorating house which is newly occupied by a pair of young overtired parents. The working mother runs night shifts and sleeps during the day, whilst the unemployed father witnesses their little daughter exhibiting increasingly strange behavior in the nights.
    
The last story is perhaps the most intriguing: 'Dark Jack' by Jenn Ashworth is about a woman who passes her evenings volunteering for a helpline and is seriously upset by a caller who keeps saying things such as, "It's dark and it's cold and I can’t get out. "

All five stories are very different, but also have some things in common: they all play with the period of the year in which nights are the longest, and strike enough notes to keep you pondering and shuddering after you’ve finished rreading. Unfortunately, this book is now sold out (the edition was limited to only 300 copies), but the good news is that the collective has just released a new collection. It is called Poor Souls' Light: Seven Curious Tales, features an introduction by Alison Flood and costs only €12.70 (including shipping). Order here. Do not wait too long, because this edition but is limited to only 500 copies. My copy is already underway.


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Don’t forget: although The Longest Night is now sold out, if you buy a copy of Poor Souls’ Light you will find within its pages a secret url which will take you to a hidden archive of recordings taken from some of the live readings we did last winter to promote the book. So buy now!

Bus Station: Unbound - FAQs

9/12/2014

 
If you're getting a Kindle for Christmas you'd be hard pressed, in our admittedly very biased opinion, to find a more enjoyable maiden voyage into the seas of digital reading than Bus Station: Unbound, the first in Curious Tales' brand new trilogy of interactive novels which is available to pre-order now.

This book tracks your journey and presents different moods, characters, genres and styles depending on the choices you make. You can read more about it here.

We've been chatting with some people who have been kind enough to give the text a preliminary proof-read and found that it might be a good idea to give you a basic run-down of what Bus Station is and why, in our humble opinion, you should give it a read.
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What exactly is interactive fiction?
There are lots of different types of interactivity, and writers use the phrase ‘interactive fiction’ in many different ways. What we mean is that Bus Station: Unbound is a book that offers you choices, a book that asks you questions, and a book that is very slippery about where the beginning and end of the story is. Put more prosaically – the narrative branches out, offering you lots of different options, and you get to decide how the main character navigates around the bus station and what she says to the people she meets. If you ever read a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style novel as a child, you’ll have some idea of what’s in store.

Is Bus Station: Unbound a book or a game?
There are game-like elements to this book – there is choice, there is risk, there are several objectives and a set of rules you have to play by. The book is also much more unstable and slippery than any standard novel – there are fifteen different versions of the opening paragraph and you’ll get a slightly different perspective on the location and the character every time you play. It just wouldn’t be possible for us to publish this novel as a traditional printed volume. Having said that, the experience itself is conveyed through text and photographs  - there’s no sound and animation, so we’re calling Bus Station: Unbound a novel, though it isn’t like one you’ve ever read before.

How do I know when I’ve reached the end? / How will I know if I’ve won?
There are over 20 different endings to Bus Station: Unbound. Some of them happen fairly early on, before you’ve had chance to explore much of the building and find out what’s going on – but the ending itself provides you with some information that will be useful to you on your next read. The objectives of the main character, however, are up to you. Do you want to get home to your parents? To discover what is happening with the mysterious local politician? To build bridges with your older brother? To rescue some teenagers who need help? Bus Station: Unbound is as much about location as it is narrative, and like all the best places, it is going to take more than one visit before you unearth its hidden treasures.

Why set it in the bus station?
Both Jenn and Richard are from Lancashire - Jenn from Preston, and both spent a lot of time in the station as teenagers. It’s a local landmark, controversial and infamous – voted both Preston’s most hated building and described as monstrous in the popular press, as well as recently saved from demolition and given Grade II listed status thanks to the efforts of a group of local creatives, academics, architects and journalists.

How did you write it?
The novel was a true collaboration – we leapt into the process without too much planning or discussion, and let the book occur – being guided by the layout and architecture of the station rather than by any preconceived idea of plot or narrative trajectory – these seemed to occur from the building itself. Weird, eh?

In practical terms – we used Inkle Writer, which is a free piece of software from Inkle Studios, the gaming studio behind Dave Morris’ Frankenstein and 80 Days. It’s accessible, simple to use and makes projects like this possible for writers and artists with big ideas and little programming know-how. As far as we’re aware, Bus Station: Unbound is the first novel-length work created using technology made available by Inkle. Thanks Inkle!

WHY did you write it?
There are three values that guide our work at Curious Tales. The first is creative collaboration – we write and make art together and we try to produce things that are more than the sum of the artists working on them. The second is experiment and risk – we’re not beholden to big publishers or distributors, we value our work but the bottom line isn’t the only thing we care about, and we’re small enough to make decisions fast. The third is form – our anthologies are beautifully illustrated and couldn’t possibly be e-books. Our e-books are fully interactive and couldn’t possibly be printed volumes.  The Unbound imprint is a perfect expression of each of these values.

When will the rest of the trilogy be published?
We have plans, eventually, for another two Unbound volumes – they will stand-alone, but link to each other in varying interesting ways. All will take place during a specific period of time, in a specific building or location, and allow the reader to explore a building as well as co-create a plot. The Curious Tales team is currently working on the next volume but we’re keeping the location of it under our hats for now. Sorry. You can always sign up to our newsletter (on our homepage) if you want to be one of the first to find out when we’re publishing it.


I don't own a Kindle. Can I read this book?
YES. If you don't own a Kindle, but have a computer, a smart-phone, tablet or any other similar device, you can download the Kindle app for free here. All you need an Amazon account.

Jenn & Richard

Bus Station: Unbound is available to pre-order at £ 3.84 for Kindle now.
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All systems... ghost?

17/11/2014

2 Comments

 
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Just a quick post to let those of you know who may have somehow missed it that our winter events schedule is now in place and our brand new book of Christmas ghost stories is now available to buy.

For those of you who attended our readings last December, these will be very much in a similar vein: atmospheric, festive and, we hope, deeply unsettling. We’re revisiting some of our favourite venues from 2013, and have also added some new ones, including the imposing John Rylands Library in central Manchester and the dungeons of Lancaster Castle. All very exciting. Some of these require booking, some don’t: again, like last year, we’re expecting those that do to sell out rather rapidly, so we’d advise not waiting to get your tickets. We had to turn some hopeful people away who’d come out to a few of our readings last year due to being fully-booked.

These are one-of-a-kind events, no two being the same. At each you will get to see each the authors’ ghost stories read in full: it’s theatrical, it’s fun and often it’s very scary (no under-13’s please), it’s the halfway point between Jackanory and a séance, if you will. Many of these events will also be serving mince pies, some mulled wine. It’s an aptly traditional way to spend a December evening – every Christmas eve the great Edwardian MR James would gather his friends and colleagues together and read them one of his ghost stories by candlelight. Our events are much the same, only less well-dressed and with regional accents.

The book containing these stories, Poor Souls’ Light: Seven Curious Tales, is currently with our printers and available to pre-order here. You’ll also be able to buy copies from us at our events (unless we sell out) as well as some stunning-looking prints of the book’s artwork. A lot of work has gone into the design of the book to ensure that, as well as a good read, it will also be a beautiful, tactile item, one which will enhance either your bookshelf or your reputation as a giver-of-stylish-gifts depending on who you buy it for. The book also includes a link to an online archive or recordings taken from the aforementioned readings we performed last year to promote The Longest Night.

Oh, and remember: Poor Souls’ Light is a limited-edition, print-only book sold only by us. There will be just 500 copies in existence. No reprints, no ISBN, no Amazon-listing and most decidedly no Kindle edition.

On which final note: Bus Station: Unbound, our choose-your-own-adventure style novel is now available to pre-order for Kindle. It’ll be published on 28th January and you can explore every brutalist inch (more or less) of one of the world’s biggest bus stations in this ultra-multifaceted novel of horror, memory, faith, history and/or family (depending on which course of narrative you go with). And, once you finish it, you can simply start again and get a new, entirely different story, and then do the same again, and again and again and again (we’ll do a proper post about the experience of writing with the incredibly clever software we used soon).

And, once all that’s out there, it will be time for The Barrow Rapture, our experimental, digital ‘exploded graphic novel’. But more of that later. For now, we’ll see you in December!


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Bus Station: Unbound (Another curious tale)

29/10/2014

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PBS HAS A STICKY, RUBBER-TILED FLOOR, AND A SMELL THAT SPEAKS OF CHEAP DEODORANT FIGHTING AN ENDLESS BATTLE WITH SOMETHING NASTY AND NAMELESS AND JUST OUT OF SIGHT. YET IT ALSO HAS SOMETHING OF THE HEROIC ABOUT IT: A QUALITY OF GIGANTISM THAT CAN INSTIL A HOPPER-LIKE SENSE OF LONELINESS, THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN AN ENGULFING ENVIRONMENT. 

 MARTIN BAKER, THE INDEPENDENT
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"The coach inches around a corner, the wheels on one side mounting a drift of snow in the gutter. You let out a sound – a scared, embarrassing-sounding little bark – and lift an uncertain arm out to protect yourself. Seated alone at the back of the coach, you’re the only passenger onboard so you allow yourself a further sound: a brief sing-song whine. Then the coach rights itself with a jump and presses on, hunkered against the snowstorm. Since you nodded off the snow seems to have intensified: the stuff takes up the windows, flurried layers shuttering off the surrounding night. Up ahead, through the driver’s window, you can just about make out a few blurred lines of light. As the bus crawls ahead the details sharpen, dark imprecision edging into a familiar network of concrete and steel: Preston Bus Station."


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Bus Station: Unbound is the first in an series of uncanny, interactive site-specific fictions.

The novel-sized work starts as a coach draws into the iconic Preston Bus Station a few days before Christmas. It is snowing heavily, it is dark and the main character wearily trudges into the station knowing she still has miles to go before she gets home to a miserable Christmas party with a family she hasn’t been in touch with in over three years. She's broke, pissed off and miserable.

So far, so festive.

But what happens when the snow continues to fall and all the buses are cancelled? When all attempts to leave the bus station fail? When strange people start to appear in the station, when she overhears stories of missing teenagers, and when a crying boy in a hoodie asks her for help?  

Thiis is interactive fiction. Part novel, part photo-book, part game - you decide what happens as you navigate through the real and imagined landscape of the iconic Preston Bus Station. 

This is much more than a simple choose-your-own-adventure story. As a Curious Tales digital-only project, we've made something that just wouldn't work in a print edition. The text of Bus Station: Unbound can track your choices and depending on your preferences, you’ll read a story of late adolescent despair, a grieving and fragmented family, guilt, fantasy and restoration, or a gripping and frightening supernatural tale about a notorious building many have described as ‘monstrous.’  More likely,  you’ll remix a unique combination of all of these. There are over twenty endings, and no limit to the amount of times you can restart, reread and try another path.

Bus Station: Unbound is another Curious Tale and will be published as a fully interactive e-book for Kindle with photography from Helen Power. It will be available to pre-order soon.

Please join our mailing list if you’d like us to let you know when it's available.


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