Difference between revisions of "Paradise Press contributors"

Revision as of 18:26, 15 October 2016

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Rochelle Baker

Rochelle Baker was born in Brooklyn, New York, and went out west to San Francisco & Seattle. She has been published in poetry journals, notably Prospero's Cell in Seattle, and given poetry workshops in Seattle and London, for instance as part of LGBT History Month at Forest Gate Library in East London. She is a member of Gay Authors Workshop, which she finds very inspiring, and has a collection of poems awaiting publication, The Sensuous Poetess.^[1]

Rex Batten

Main article: Rex Batten

Rex Batten was a student at RADA in the same class as Joe Orton. He eventually took up teaching. He has written plays for radio and produced several local history publications. He became a gay activ­ist and wrote Rid England of this Plague, based on personal experi­­ence of the 1950s purge when simply being gay was a crime. The book became a set book at Gender Studies courses and led to several television appearances.^[2]

Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett grew up in Ethiopia. He won the 2001 Poetry London Competition and second prize in Chroma 2006. His collec­tion, Ethiopia Boy, came out from Carcanet/Oxford Poets in 2013 and he is now trying to write about hunger in an Ethiopian context, and not just the Live Aid kind! Meanwhile, he is collaborating with his partner, the artist Isao Miura, on translating Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North into visual and textual images. The first "outing" of this work, "Sketches from the Poem Road", was shown at the Poetry Café, 2015, and the book from Hagi Press was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. A much larger Sketches exhibition was held at the Glass Tank Gallery in Oxford Brookes University, summer 2016.^[2]

Kathryn Bell

Kathryn Bell was born in Glasgow and went to work in Africa where she met Elsa Wallace. She has been writing for about 25 years. Her stories have been published in Sappho, Capital Gay, Gazebo, The Green Queen and Queer Haunts She produces the quarterly GAW Newsletter and edits The Green Queen. She would like to write a novel but – so she says – lacks the stamina. She enjoys folk music, chocolate and arguing.^[2]

Tim Blackwell

Tim Blackwell lives in North London with his dog, Olaf. He trained as an actor at The Webber Douglas Academy, and has wide experience performing in theatre and film. Tim writes prose and drama. Several of his plays have been produced at venues including The Young Vic and The Crucible Studio, Sheffield. A collection of his short fiction, The Bingo Caller and other stories, is published by Connaught Books.^[2]

Les Brookes

Les Brookes is the author of Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall: ideology, conflict and aesthetics. He published his first novel Such Fine Boys in 2013 and is currently at work on a second. He has twice been a prize-winner in the Cam­bridge Writers Short Story Competition. www.lesbrookes.com.^[2]

Ross Burgess

Main article: Ross Burgess

Ross Burgess lives in Purley with his husband, Roger, volunteering with LGBT groups and creating online articles for the UK LGBT Archive, www.lgbtarchive.uk. Before retirement he worked as an IT consultant and tech­nical author, and produced books on computer subjects. Having edited Out of the Shadows (Bona Street Press, 2010) and Diverse Performances (Paradise Press, 2014) he became com­missioning editor for Amiable Warriors, the history of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (Paradise Press: Volume One published 2015). Encouraged by Gay Authors Workshop, he’s recently started writing fiction for the first time since leaving school.^[2]

Brian Burton

Brian Burton took up escort work rather later in life than most, and then after some years started and ran an escort agency. Occasionally he uses these experiences as the basis for fiction, but finds it necessary to glamorise them considerably in the process.^[3]

Andrew Cheffings

Andrew Cheffings writes: I am a Buddhist, practising Soto Zen and Pureland traditions. I have had OCD for 45 years and am currently having EMDR therapy. My writing is an important part of my healing journey and I have written hundreds of hymns called Hymns of Change in which I am working on the spirituality of moving from a very difficult mental outlook to, hopefully, a calmer one. I have been with my partner, Ian, for 26 years.^[2]

Daniel Clements

Daniel Clements lives in Cambridge as close as he can contrive to be to his office to save on bleary-eyed morning walks. While he now works in IT for the NHS, in the past he has dabbled in archaeology, education and cookery. Writing has always been a private affair, a way of organising different thoughts and feelings by pinning them on a piece of paper. This is, therefore, a terrifying experience for him. His interests outside of writing include board games, com­puters, science and anything else that can have the word ‘nerd’ ascribed to it.^[2]

Simon Dessloch

Simon Dessloch studied Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. His stories have appeared in Nthposition, Faster than Life, Rouge and Mr X and in People Your Mother Warned You About.^[2]

Nacho Diaz

Nacho Diaz is a newcomer to the authors’ world although he has been writing and campaigning to combat the stigmatisation of drug users and mental health survivors on www.talkingdrugs.org for over three years. His forthcoming book will narrate the experiences of an adolescent searching for freedom and acceptance in a hostile environment full of intransigence.^[3]

John Dixon

Main article: John Dixon

John Dixon has had poems in Envoi, Chroma, Iota, Orbis, Nomad, Gazebo and Haiku Quarterly. His first volume was Seeking, Finding, Losing. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and his volume of short stories, The Carrier Bag, includes the Bridport Prize-winning title story. The story "Comrades" won a prize at the Chorley Writer’s Competition. His novel Push harder Mummy, I want to come out is due for publication shortly. He has edited Fiction in Libraries, and a volume of Ivor Treby’s unpublished poems. He co-edited the poetry anthology Coming Clean. He is drawing up an inventory of the stories and song lyrics by the late Michael Harth.^[2]

Jeffrey Doorn

Main article: Jeffrey Doorn

Jeffrey Doorn was born in New Jersey, and now lives with his civil partner in South London. His work has appeared in Gawp and Gaze, Queer Words, The Quarterly Review, Mandate, Gazebo, Queer Haunts, People Your Mother Warned You About, plus the poetry anthologies Slivers of Silver, Oysters and Pearls and Coming Clean, all of which he co-edited. He is active in his local civic society and Library Friends group, and also contributes to local history publications.^[2]

David Downing

David Downing lives and writes near Ullapool in Wester Ross, Scotland, and hopes to shortly commence an MLitt in Highland and Islands Literature at the UHI. The opening sentence of his long-researched contemporary gay epic has finally been written and, should Calliope wish to visit the straths and glens, he would be most grateful for her assistance with ensuing chapters.^[3]

Jimmy Driver

Jimmy Driver is a bisexual skinhead, living in Surrey. He was born in London and brought up in Ilford, before 'Essex Man' was heard of. He studied English Literature at Sussex University and did a number of jobs before getting ME. His favourite writers include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, Woolf and Henri Bosco.^[1]

Pat Dungey

Pat Dungey writes: I was born in Luton, Bedfordshire. I came out at 31. I have recently stopped full-time teaching and am focussing on writing about my experiences and researching 1920s and 1930s women in London and Paris. I enjoy giving talks and visiting London galleries and museums for inspiration. Writing these poems has got me through some difficult times. I hope the reader recognises the feelings in these words and feels less alone, at such times.^[2]

Steve Ferris

Steve Ferris writes: I am not a poet, I am a painter. It controls and colours everything I do. I have, despite that, written many poems including several sequences. Poems have appeared in the anthology Coming Clean. I am currently devoting my time to artwork, getting ready for summer shows and competitions. I recently had to move house and shifting the 10,000 finished paintings caused me no end of trouble: perhaps it will lead to another sequence?^[2]

Jane Fletcher

Jane Fletcher, having escaped the chaos and concrete of London, lives in South West England, surrounded by enough historic sites to keep her happy. Her novels have twice won GCLS awards and been short-listed for the Gaylactic Spectrum and Lambda awards. She is also a recipient of the Alice B. Readers Appreciation Awards medal. She is author of two fantasy series, The Lyremouth Chronicles and the Celaeno series.^[4]

Martin Foreman

Main article: Martin Foreman

Martin Foreman is an actor, author and seller of rare gay books. His published work includes the novels Weekend and The Butterfly’s Wing and the short story collections A Sense of Loss and First and Fiftieth (Paradise Press). Five of his plays have been produced in Los Angeles and London. He lives in Islington Borders.^[3]

David Gee

Main article: David Gee

David Gee has worked in London, Bahrain and Qatar. His first novel Florence of Arabia (under the pen-name David Godolphin), re­published as David Gee’s Shaikh-Down, anticipated the "Arab Spring" by ten years, with a gay banker and an air hostess kick-starting a spicy revolution on a Persian Gulf island. He has pub­lished two dark social comedies set in his native Sussex: The Dropout and (from Paradise Press) The Bexhill Missile Crisis. Coming soon to Kindle, Howl and the Pussy-Kat features a soap-stud and a porn star cast in a remake of a Bette Davis weepie. Website and blog: www.davidgeebooks.com.^[2]

Dina Gordon

Dina Gordon (aged 24 in 2014) is an actor and performance poet. Coming Clean includes two portions of a long series of poems she began writing in November 2012 surrounding "Alberto", an ongoing depiction of a guy in Shoreditch, first performed at the Flying Dutchman in London.^[5]

Ramon Gonzalez

Ramon Gonzalez was born in Galicia (Spain) and has lived in London since 1971. He studied art first at Chelsea School of Art and later at Wimbledon School of Art where he obtained a degree in Fine Arts in 1982. One of his paintings was used to illustrate the book cover of A Life’s Tales by Joe Hucknall, his partner. Apart from the combined activities of painting and poetry, another main inter­est is philosophy on which subject he is writing a book (now near completion) which he intends to publish in the near future.^[2]

Henrik Harryson

Henrik Harrysson was born in The Ottoman Empire, of Northumbrian ancestry. He grew up in Wessex, before studying at Mercia's principal university. Following a spell teaching in The Holy Roman Empire, and in the Kingdom of the Franks, he returned to North Wessex, where he lives with his swain and two cats. ^[1]

Michael Harth

Main article: Michael Harth

Michael Harth, who died in April 2016, was a founder member of GAW and a prolific writer and lyricist. He early gave up a conven­tional life and for many years was one half of a piano duo, performing original lyrics set to newly-composed music. He was editor of Lightning Fingers, a symposium on the British composer-pianist Billy Mayerl. His short stories appeared in various gay magazines, going back to one of the first, Quorum. He produced three volumes of short stories, and edited two short story anthologies, as well as editing the GAW in-house magazine, Gazebo. He wrote three novels and at the time of his death was preparing for publication a trilogy about a gay priest.^[2]

Joseph Hucknall

Main article: Joseph Hucknall

Joseph Hucknall was born in Cumbria and educated by seven siblings who came before him, then drafted into the army before drifting south as a protégé of Woolworth. Joe worked the system until he was found out and paid to take early retirement. He travelled extensively in comfort, picking up and dropping relation­ships until, late in life, he met his soulmate, Ramon Gonzalez, and handcuffed him into a civil partnership. His first work, A Splendid Book for Lucky Children, written at four­teen, never made it into print. Joe has contributed to Gazebo and defunct minor poetry publications. For greater insight and reve­lations from boy to man read his memoir, A Life’s Tales.^[2]

Zekria Ibrahimi

Zekria Ibrahimi writes: I am a schizophrenic – someone always in fear of being sectioned. The psychiatric establishment is about middle-class conformity. I am doubly-disadvantaged – mentally disabled, and swarthy and ethnic, under a racist British society that cannot accept difference. Being categorised as elderly, I have grown scared of ageism everywhere.^[2]

Jeremy Kingston

Jeremy Kingston is a poet and playwright, the author of two novels and two children’s books, and for many years he was a theatre critic, for Punch and then for The Times. His most recent plays have been Oedipus at the Crossroads and Making Dickie Happy. His two poetry collections are On the Lookout (2008) and Who is he, who am I, who are they? (2013); a third, Risking It, is planned for 2017. He has recently completed a sequence of linked short stories, Eye to Eye, tracing responses to homosexual love down the centuries.^[2]

V G Lee

V. G. Lee lives and writes in Hastings, East Sussex. She is the author of a collection of short stories, As You Step Outside, and four novels. Her fifth novel, Mr Oliver’s Object of Desire, will be published in September 2016 by Ward Wood Publishing. In 2014 she won The Ultimate Planet award for Best Established Author. In her sixtieth year, she decided to become a stand-up comedian and is a regular per­former at Laughing Cows comedy nights in London, Birming­ham and Coventry.^[2]

Jazmine Linklater

Jazmine Linklater is an artist and writer, working towards a BA Honours degree in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. Her studies are focused on poetry and short story writing. Her artistic practice is centred around language, with a focus on semi-autobiographical, illustrative and performative works. Over the course of 2013 Jazmine exhibited and read at various events including York Literature Festival, artist Franko B’s pop-up exhibition UNTOUCHABLE in Camberwell, and shown work as part of the collective Nowt But Spit an’ Glue in Leeds. She also collaboratively curated her first exhibition, post-Jefferson Airplane, and has been working with writer Nick Thurston from the independent publishing imprint "Information as Material".^[5]

Elizabeth J Lister

Main article: Elizabeth J Lister

Elizabeth J. Lister began to write seriously after her seventieth birthday. Her aim to create suspenseful stories, in which her charac­ters live comfortably with their homosexuality, has resulted in short stories and five consecutive (stand-alone) novels in which women tackle real-life problems like prison sentences, rehabili­tation, single parenthood, unfaithful partners and homophobia. Love interweaves the plots!^[2]

Paul Mann

Main article: Paul Mann

Paul Mann escaped cruise ships to collect tickets on a Dorset chain ferry. Other jobs included working in a bank in Toronto, washing dishes, being a commando, owning a Chinese takeaway and managing a Top Rank Suite. Bored stiff by clerical work in the NHS, he packed bread in Tescos, where he lasted a week. He has published six books.^[4]

Devon Marshall

Devon Marshall has been writing short stories for many years and recently published her first full-length novel. When not writing she is studying for degrees in theology and psychology.^[4]

Miles Martlett

Miles Martlett is currently preparing, with what energy and spare moments as are left after fulfilling his duties as Master of Ceremonies at the members-only Scaffold Bar, a translation of the erotic poems of the little-known Greek poet Thracylides of Argos, on whom he is an internationally unrecognised authority.^[3]

Zanna C Mayhew

Zanna C. Mayhew has been hooked on horses for even longer than she has been part of the gay liberation movement - and she won't say how long that is. In between writing fiction, going to the races, and attending meetings, she works freelance and potters slowly round Essex on horseback.^[1]

Drew Payne

Drew Payne has had work published in Chroma, Velvet Mafia, Creative Week, Out in the City, Gay Flash Fiction and ImageOut Literary Magazine; and in the anthologies, The Monster in My Closet, Eros at Large, and Boys in Bed. He writes regularly for Nursing Standard and NRC magazines. His sketches have been performed in the News Revue, the longest running satirical review show.^[2]

Christopher Preston

Main article: Christopher Preston

Christopher Preston is a playwright and dramaturg/director. His first play The Davids played to sell-out audiences for the London New Play Festival in 1999. His development of Underbelly (LNPF 1998) and Babel Junction (Maya Productions 2006) are favourite projects. Twenty-two Eighty-four was published by Paradise Press in 2014 and he is currently preparing an anthology of his plays. After working in UK theatre for 35 years, Christopher now lives in New Zealand, writing fiction and blogging about travel and the arts on www.christopherprestonwrites.com.^[2]

David Reade

David Reade was born during the Second World War and grew up inChelmsford before settling in London for 30 years. He now lives in Thailand. He has always distrusted all kinds of authority, including his father and his headmaster. He has composed many short stories, several appearing in the GAW Newsletter and the anthologies People Your Mother Warned You About and Eros at Large. He has written four novels and many poems.^[2]

Richard Reddie

Richard Reddie is the pseudonymous author of a number of privately printed works of erotic fiction (all produced to finance a particular project, and now mercifully out of print). Currently a fan is attempting to persuade him to place the contents of these on the internet, but to date he has resisted the temptation.^[3]

Graham Robertson

Main article: Graham Robertson

Graham Robertson’s dad was a pharmaceutical chemist, his mum a milliner. He went to Penarth Grammar School where he learnt to love Literature, cottaging and rough trade. Rolled more times than the Lords cricket pitch. Attended Oxford and Toulouse Universities. Became a teacher, then Penarth’s answer to Lovejoy. Wrote a bit. Now on the Board of an art gallery turning the Pier Pavilion into a multi-media arts centre.^[4]

Adrian Risdon

Main article: Adrian Risdon

Risdon’s Survey of Shropshire is a verse-story (one of a sequence of seven such "Surveys"), and appears in Coming Clean in its entirety. Using Edmund Spenser’s stanza with its famously long last line the poem empowers the individual reader to control how much (s)he wishes to read at a sitting. The "Surveys" have been performed by poetry groups – Adrian reciting lines 1–8 and his audience chanting the long last line: "ballad" (as it were) followed by "refrain". The "Surveys" all tell the same tragi-comical story: he made a mistake and was punished for it severely.^[5]

Julie Rutherford

Julie Rutherford has been published in various magazines, anthologies and online. She has written song cycles Towards the Light, Winter When Past Unseen, and an oratorio, Cantio Animae. She hopes to develop her work with composers. She finds inspiration walking in the rain and drizzle in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. She supports the work of Centred (formerly Kairos in Soho).^[5]

Anne Stanesby

Anne Stanesby has published various handbooks of legal advice, but in recent years has been spending a lot of time pursuing her interest in horticulture.^[4]

Ian Stewart

Main article: Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart continues working on his forthcoming Paradise Press novel Parable with Foreskin and Redheads under duress of considerable family responsibilities tangled around his elderly father’s dementia. His Paradise Press story collection Cocksuckery is now available as an e-book.^[3]

Frank Storm

Frank Storm was born in 1940 in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Grew up there and in Holland. Lived and worked in Oz, Germany, France and Holland and finally settled in the UK where he lived and worked with his lover until the latter’s untimely death. Retired, he moved to sunny Spain, where he is still wondering if it was a good idea…^[3]

Ivor Treby

Main article; Ivor Treby

Ivor Treby, who died in 2012, was a poet, early gay activist and member of Gay Authors Workshop. He produced five volumes of poetry between 1988 and 2000, but virtually abandoned writing to edit the poems of Michael Field, the pseudonym of two lesbian poetesses of the late nineteenth century. He resumed writing in 2006 and until his death wrote over sixty poems. A handful of these were published in small magazines, and a few surfaced at readings he gave to gay groups. These unpublished poems 2007–2012 were edited by John Dixon. The poems are generally short, genial and formally constructed.^[2]

Leigh V Twersky

Leigh V. Twersky lives in London, where he was born. While he has had poems and short stories published before, he is delighted that this is his first for Paradise Press. He is currently adding the finishing touches to a gay-themed novel set in a dystopian Britain and working on a couple of novellas in what he recently learned could be described as the ‘gay insect horror’ sub-genre.^[2]

Elsa Wallace

Main article: Elsa Wallace

Elsa Wallace lived in Africa for the first 30 years of her life, and has been writing for 40 years, mostly short stories, which have featured in several anthologies. Her collections of short stories include The Monkey Mirror, Ghosts and Gargoyles and Kissy-Face. She has written a novel Merle and the novella Lord Hyaena. Her favourite authors are Dickens and Ivy Compton-Bennett.^[2]

Donald West

Main article: Donald West

Donald West studied medicine and specialised in psychiatry and sexology. He has authored eleven books on psychiatry and crimin­ology, including the pioneering Homosexuality (1955, rev. ed. 1968); Sexual Crimes and Confrontations (1987): Male Prostitution (1992) and Children’s Sexual encounters with Adults. His memoir Gay Life, Straight Work was published by Paradise Press in 2012. He has had several short stories published in anthologies. He was thrice Presi­dent of the Society for Psychical Research and is now an Honorary Vice-President of CHE.^[2]

Alice F Wickham

Alice Frances Wickham is an Irish writer, living in South West London. She edits the popular blog site, newlondonwriters.com, which started out as a street zine in 1998 and featured such luminaries as Bette Bourne of Bloolips and the late, great Quentin Crisp. Alice works as a Medical PA and in her spare time, writes, blogs, edits, runs writers’ workshops, and occasion­­ally acts as a literary scout for London-based literary agencies. Alice has been published in Litro Magazine, Edge Maga­zine, and one or two other slipstream outlets. Currently working on a humorous novel set in Dublin about the problem of her non-binary identity.^[2]

Penelope Wissell

Penelope Wissel is a keen collector of African artefacts, though to her regret she hasn’t yet come across any as useful as the one described in her story in Eros at Large. There is no truth whatsoever in the rumour that she keeps a tame stud locked up in her cellar.^[3]

Gregory Woods

Main article: Gregory Woods

Gregory Woods is the author of five poetry collections from Carcanet Press, the latest being Quidnunc (2007) and An Ordinary Dog (2011). Peter Porter called him "the poet with the sharpest technique for social verse in Britain today". Sinead Morrissey called him "prob­ably, the finest gay poet in the United Kingdom". His non-fiction includes Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all published by Yale University Press. He was the first professor of gay and lesbian studies in the UK. www.gregorywoods.co.uk.^[2]

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3} People Your Mother Warned You About contributors on the Paradise Press website.
2. ↑ ^{2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.24 2.25 2.26 2.27 2.28 2.29} A Boxful of Ideas, pages 259–266
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8} Eros at large contributors on the Paradise Press website
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4} Best of Gazebo contributors on the Paradise website
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3} Coming Clean contributors on the Paradise Press website.