- Interviews -




JANICE GALLOWAY
and the Short Story Form



JG: I’m interested in difficulty. If you have a friend that you go round and see once a month, and their life is always cakes and roses, their beautiful new child, and all the rest of it, eventually you get fed up [laughs], right fed up with them. What makes a good story is something to chew on ... click here to read more








This Is Airdrie:
TCB interview with David Keenan



DK: I would go so far as to say that if you ever feel you’re ‘describing’ something then you have clearly failed to manifest that something completely, and the reader is now listening to your description of something as opposed to coming into direct contact with the thing itself ... click here to read more








Talking 'How Late It Was, How Late'
with James Kelman



JK: I was already involved in my own work in my own way. The crucial thing for me was recognising kindred artists involved in identical, and related, issues, struggling with language as an effect of linguistic and cultural imperialism ... click here to read more








Clare, Kelman, and Working-Class Art
 with Professor Simon Kövesi



SK: Class is awkward for us all. I know a working-class writer who is doing publicly well but lives precariously still, who repeatedly has materially middle-class senior academics asking him to validate their working-class credentials ... click here to read more








Alan Warner on
'The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven'



AW: Then obviously you are going to have characters that you don’t agree with at all - bastards or insensitive psychos, but you still have to express their position. They will say stuff that you don’t agree with but that you might feel enlarges their character on the page ... click here to read more








fiction & essays
The Nightshift
In the end, it was probably right that the first job I got after uni was a nightshift – I hadn’t slept properly in months. Or longer. My old boy done nightshift his whole life
In The 25th Year Since
How Late It Was, How Late
Any specific memories of the first time I read How Late It Was have faded over time, but the one thing I know is that I read and re-read the opening of the book multiple times...
@thecommonbreath
the works in progress blog
'Holy buttons, sad but dignified'
by Bechaela Walker
She sat at the full-length streaky café window overlooking the carpark and thought of how empty the train had been—how did they keep running such services?
'Jamie' by Jim Gibson
There’s no one else to talk to so I might as well make the most of it. It’s a horrible thought but I can’t help thinking that his life is sort of like an animal’s
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