I think of myself as a landscape writer, so the inspiration for Bella started there - the strange landscape of my home, the Black Country. In Dudley and its surrounding areas there’s an unusual mix of rural and urban, domestic and wild, industrial, post-industrial and hyper-modern. It’s off-kilter, in-between, not-quite-one-thing-not-quite-another. And this weird geography makes the sense of place odd too - both old and new, ruined and re-purposed, safe and unsafe, familiar and unfamiliar, attractive and repulsive. For a writer, these grounds are rich, charged and irresistible - the liminal arena of transition, transformation and transgression. I see it as the fertiliser and seedbed for narrative, drama and poetry - especially Weird tales like Bella. In the tradition of Frankenstein being awestruck in the mountains or a Lovecraftian infinitesimal-infinite surfacing in the crack of a wall, Dudley holds a post-industrial sublime - A Black Country Gothic.
Writers like Joel Lane, Roy McFarlane, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Liz Berry and Meera Syall all share a fascination and preoccupation with this region, and use its peculiar culture, topography, dialect and spirit of place as symbolic and literal setting for their explorations of sex, identity, murder, mayhem, joy and terror. Characters in much of contemporary BC literature use the liminal landscape and its Gothic qualities as arenas for coming into being - often through transgressive routes. In Bella, I’m trying to play my own part in this uniquely Black Country literary tradition. All of the writers above, but especially Lane, have been huge inspirations to my poetics and vision. Speaking of cultural antecedents, Bella plays its part in another region specific literary tradition. The part-fact-part-fable mystery of Bella and the Wych-Elm; an unsolved murder of a woman whose remains were found in the hulk of tree. This story branches into witchcraft, satanism, Cold War espionage and domestic abuse in rhizomes that remain so enigmatic writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists continue to be pulled into her echoing orbit. As did I. Again, in great Gothic tradition, the narrative can only be understood by the slow unravelling of disparate elements. Bella’s secrets, set within the borderless Black Country are the limestone foundations of this love song to my home, its ghosts and its people. Bella is available from Wild Pressed Books http://www.wildpressedbooks.com/bella.html
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