Launching a Book into the Stratosphere

Being a writer is weird. You wouldn’t expect all your mates to turn up to a work gig, but when it comes to a book launch, only on average 3% of acceptances materialise into faces on the day. And it feels like a peculiar kind of betrayal. But I get it. Life gets in the way of even the best intentions. No one can afford to give up an extra shift, find childcare, the mental space to travel to a strange city. There was even a major football match to compete with. But luckily, that didn’t stop a lovely bunch of humans coming to my launch and celebrating the infliction of a bittersweet story onto an unprepared world.

We were in safe hands. Bristol Waterstones had prepared the room. Reassuring and professional. They held the space whilst my stomach lurched and pitched. Folding chairs sat expectantly. Wine loitered. Fresh-faced copies stood by the till. A warm welcome and curious questions began before the doors had opened. What was it like to work in a prison? How long did it take you to write it? I had answers for those questions: no different to any teaching job but with some added jeopardy and unexpected hope, three years of pulling words from a tired CPTSD brain. What I hadn’t prepared myself for was the actual giving away of books. Watching them leave with other people, clutched by hands not my own.

Ghosted had begun as a journal of truly awful but vital therapeutic poems. Glimpses of darker days. Fracture lines held by the page. Cracks were where the colours come through. Haiku and senryu turned into sentences. Time served inside. The notebooks held what my brain couldn’t. Lines scored the triumphs of survival, the failures of leavings. None of it was meant to be seen by anyone else. The stories of others as they wove around my feet and tripped me up. Sharing them would mean danger. Safety breach birthed into the world. Made into stark reality and questioned. What was I doing there? Was it safe? Was it worth it? Slowly, I sifted through the words. Ordering and processing what I hadn’t been able to share with anyone else. If a problem shared is a problem halved, then why give others the burden? But what began to appear through the inky mess of scored tree husks was another way of allowing it all to breathe.

As a novel, I could tell the stories as they met my own, take only what had been given and leave the rest behind. I’d seen enough stories stolen and sold as sensational memoirs to know the pain it caused on both sides – lost voices and others doomed to obsessive recall. I knew this was going to be about loss. I was left haunted by leavings. Left on read. Hovering in mid-air, anxious. But as a work of supposed fiction, I could bring back the missing. So of course, when I least expected it, Dean strode back onto the screen. Slipping through my fingers, carrying the story in a string bag, leaving a trail of glitter in his wake. These tiny shards of light static clung to the despair of previous pages. The fires, the deaths, the fights, the drugs. Bringing what the novel needed – the reason I had stayed for so long: hope.

And here I was again. Sat in a room full of expectant eyes, hoping for change. To show what it is like to teach in a prison, to try and fail and try again to explain what it means to be human when everything else is taken away from you. Your name, your freedom, your belongings, your family. As a teacher I had to leave them all behind and return a different, guarded self. But at least I got to go home each day. Some never made it. Others only briefly. And some I never saw again. Unlike the faces I now looked at in the audience, former students now friends and some of the people who carried my heart when I thought it was gone.

I read out a section on how the Grenfell tower tragedy affected men inside. How they felt its shadow as we sat in a classroom next to a burnt-out wing. How we could smell the smoke.

How they sent food and basic provisions to support those left behind. It’s five years since that awful time and the inquest is only just over. We had already picked over the bones of it. And here I was again. Going over the details. With a group of smiling, nodding faces who reminded me of what is also left. The refusal to let these unjust things lie in stagnant memory. The power of words to find spaces for memory and call it to action.

My long-suffering publisher/wingman was there. He asked how the book came about. The dark humour needed to survive. Who the characters were based on, including the handy device of a friend I had to explain things to. Then questions from the lovely audience. I hung on their words. What effect did prison have – PTSD in all its raw honesty. The blessing and curse of remembering it all. What did writing do – held and healed. Did I feel empathy for the people there – of course. Even when it was tested by discovering their index crimes. There are always several sides to any story, and it wasn’t my job to tell theirs. It had taken me three years to write this version of mine.

This is the start of something else. The second stage of labour. Pushing the words out into the world after they have stewed in my head and boiled in my second-brain belly. A time to set free the words written on wings. Close my eyes and throw them up in the air. Hope they are as well received as they were at the launch. Hope that the press which now holds those words is aptly titled. We’ve launched a book into the Stratosphere.

All thanks go to: the Staff at Bristol Waterstones, GM Photos for the filming and images, Stratosphere Press, the people who came along to support us and those still inside.