On The Snout :   
'Waiting for Nothing' with Duncan McLean  


DMcL: I’m always looking for physicality in narrative. I don’t mean that it has to be describing or relating physical actions, but that the language of the narrative is aware of its own physicality ... click here to read more










Year #1, The Common Breath

Selections from Artist Interviews



BH: In of our first year of operation, we conducted a total of 17 artist interviews. As part of the first anniversary celebrations, I created a compilation of questions from each. Enjoy ... click here to read more










Look At Me How,  
Exploring the 'musical space' with A.L. Kennedy  


ALK: I’m a writer and that’s a great job and I’m lucky that it actually is a job for me – but part of being grateful for that and being fully present in that has to be a suitable engagement with the world. I have spent 30+ years learning how to say things as clearly as I can and in an atmosphere of emotionally-charged lies and manipulations ... click here to read more










WITCHES' BREW ...  
An interview with Stewart Home  


SH: Modernism broke with that tradition but then eighteenth-century and earlier literature that pre-dates the perfected bourgeois novel can also become a vehicle for moving on and away from it ... click here to read more










Within the Word Machine:  
Jenni Fagan, interviewed by Kirsten Anderson  


JF: I spend so much time with the characters and worlds that they are as real to me in many ways, as prior relationships, or places where I have lived. They are places where I have lived ... click here to read more










The Sound of his Voice:  
Ron Butlin, interviewed by Rachael Fulton  


RB: I always start with a few words that pop into my head and simply see where they take me – most of the time I don’t know if the words will turn into a poem, a story, or even a novel. My approach is Don’t Plan and Don’t Think. I have learned to trust my imagination ... click here to read more










Serious Listening...

Alan Warner & Brian Hamill in conversation



AW: I read an interview with an academic and novelist recently, where she was asked what was the last book to make her cry, and she replied that tears were not relevant to literary judgement. If you extrapolate that, you get this dry, hard concept that what literature makes us FEEL is irrelevant ... click here to read more










"Gimme Shelter"

Wendy Erskine on voice & narrative



WE: Somebody asked me not so long ago if I edited my stories. They weren’t trying to be rude. I know what they meant. They seem straightforward. I wanted to appropriate Dolly Parton and say, baby, it takes a lot of money and effort to look this cheap! But I didn’t. I just said something bland and polite ... click here to read more










Negofeminism & Art
Chika Unigwe interviewed by Rachael Fulton


CU: It was especially important to me to do research because I had my preconceived notions of what a prostitute was like. And I also had watched some reportages on human trafficking. If I had written the novel without doing the field work, I would have ended up writing a type rather than individual women ... click here to read more










LONDON CLASSIC...

Talking city literature with John King



JK: As this is fiction there is room for some flamboyance, a celebration of speech, and it is important to keep that voice going when it comes to a person’s inner thoughts and the prose generally. Other characters I have to approach differently, as I won’t be so familiar with their language, and know I can never get it right... click here to read more










A Romance of the Dour:
An interview with the novelist Todd McEwen


McE: What I am very strongly against is the workshop, the primary method by which which your money is stolen and your time wasted as a student in a creative writing program. See the remarks of August Kleinzahler passim on ‘professionalized’ creative writing programs—he said ‘It’s a terrible thing to lie to young people ...’ click here to read more










Interview with Bernard MacLaverty:

Language, Rhythm, Music



BM: It’s only a couple of hundred years since my family thought in Irish. I have retained my accent. There is no reason why the Irish shouldn’t retain grammar and constructions that make English sound individual and new minted. I think a similar thing has happened to Jewish writers ... click here to read more










Ducks, Towns, and Prizes:

TCB Interview with Sam Jordison



SJ: One way of putting it might be that we wanted a publishing house that put the book first and asked all the other questions about how you market it later. We wanted to be led by the love of the writing, rather than notions of how well it might sell. Or perhaps a better way of putting it might be that we hoped that if we loved a book ... click here to read more








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








'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:


'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