Featured image: John Keir

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Comma Press celebrated their latest short story collection with an author reading and Q&A at Contact Theatre in Manchester as part of the 2024 Manchester Literature Festival.

PhD student at the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and former aAh! Magazine Editorial Assistant Brontë Schiltz, is featured in the collection. Brontë’s short story, Contents May Vary, was published alongside the works of twelve other celebrated Manchester-based authors in Comma Press’s most recent anthology in their ‘Reading the City’ series.

The Book of Manchester portrays the city in a much more introspective light amidst the city’s thriving urban landscape through the exploration of themes such as gentrification, love and loss, queer relationships, alienation and the city’s post-war and post-industrial decline to the aspirational ‘Manctopia’ through the lenses of Manchester’s ordinary residents and their everyday struggles and experiences.

Brontë shares her connections to the city, her identity as a student, the context and inspiration behind Contents May Vary, and her blog post written for Comma Press, which explores the ‘Myth of Individualism.’

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Could you tell us a little bit about your connections to Manchester and what inspired you to get involved with this collection?

I moved to Manchester six years ago for my MA. I did my MA at the Manchester Center for Gothic Studies at MMU, where I’m now doing a PhD, but I loved Manchester before that. One of my good friends is from here, and I’d been visiting for a few years before, I came up quite regularly.

I started writing my story that’s in The Book of Manchester, a very, very early draft of it, about ten years ago when I was an undergrad doing English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, very far away from Manchester. So it wasn’t as Manchester-based then, it was kind of semi-Manchester-based that was inspired by my visits here, but I revisited it after I moved here and had more of a connection to the city. I’ve lived here six years now and in quite a few different places, many of which come up in the story. I have lived in Hulme, various places in Salford, and I live in Ancoats now.

It was actually David Sue, who edited this collection, who got in touch with me. He had come across a version of the story that I had published in an Italian magazine, of all places, a couple of years ago. This collection is partly new stories commissioned for the book, and partly older stories that the editors sought out permission to print and mine was one of those, but I edited it a bit to make it a bit more Manchester-centric. The original version I’d written had been quite specific in its Manchester setting, so I’d actually taken some of that out for this Italian magazine, because I thought: ‘No one will know what I’m talking about!’ I then reinserted them for this collection, which is how it came about and came to be more suited to The Book of Manchester. 

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As a current PhD student at Manchester Met, and former MA graduate, do you feel like your identity as a student has shaped your experience of the city?

Yeah, absolutely. My life would be completely different if I didn’t live in Manchester and not just in the sense of where I live and my friends, but my career has been hugely shaped by being here and by my experiences at Manchester Met, especially. Towards the end of my MA, I started working at The Big Issue North, and I’m still working there now. I started off in comms and fundraising, and I’m now working as a journalist there, and that was in large part due being in exactly the right place at the right time. I lived very close to the offices at the time, but it was also through my work at aAh! Magazine that I got the experience that made me eligible for that role.

The experiences I’ve had since then have really shaped who I am as a writer, partly through my work at The Big Issue, but partly through my PhD and my involvement with the Manchester Center for Gothic Studies. I’ve got to work with some writers that I really admire, and have conversations with them about their work and that’s definitely informed the way I approach my writing. I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t moved here, it would be completely different!

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In your Comma Press blog, you share how – much like your protagonist in your short story – you wouldn’t be who you are today without your move to Manchester. Have you got any favourite memories of living in the city, or where do you think she would have ended up otherwise?

I have no idea where I would have ended up otherwise, definitely not doing what I do now! To get my job at The Big Issue, I was completely in the right place at the right time, and with the opportunities I’ve had since then, I really can’t imagine what I’d be doing. Even my friends, who aren’t from Manchester, I’ve met lots of them through work that I’ve done with The Manchester Center for Gothic Studies, so I honestly can’t imagine. 

I think when I was younger, I had a very set idea of how I wanted my life to go – and there was a period of time where my life wasn’t going how I wanted it to go – and I found that very difficult. But what I’ve realised is that life doesn’t really work like that. You can plan everything out and it’s not going to happen with the best will in the world. Things will happen in your life that you are on a different course, and the course that Manchester has taken me on has definitely been, well, it’s hard to say the right one. You’d probably be saying that wherever you ended up if you enjoy your life, but certainly one that I love. 

As for my favourite memories, there’s so many. It could be so many different things, because I’ve been able to work with people that I really admire and writers I really admire through Manchester Met. I got to do an event with Jeremy Dyson, who is one of my favourite writers, recently and that was amazing. His short stories have really influenced the way I write. Also, I live with my best friend and our puppy, and many of my favourite memories are just spending evenings with her. I think that’s the kind of mosaic of the momentous experiences that you have in life, and then the mundane ones. That’s what I find very interesting and what I like to write about, and what this story hopefully captures.

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Could you tell us a bit more about how the story has evolved in the last decade and what inspired you to put it forward to be part of the anthology?

I suppose the main things that have changed is that I’ve got to know Manchester a lot better and became a lot more rooted. That was less of a concern in the early draft, which focused more on the narrator’s earlier life, which is kind of drawn from my own life. Some of those images and my own memories were lifted quite directly, though placed into quite a different context, my childhood wasn’t as dramatic as my narrator’s was implied to be. So that rooting in place has been the thing that changed, not just through this collection, but through moving to Manchester. I redrafted it a few years ago, and I really thought about how Manchester has shaped my life, and the moments that have set my life on different courses, and those have been big moments. 

In my story there’s a moment where my narrator goes to the theatre and she falls in love with it, and that shapes the course of her professional life, and I’ve certainly had experiences like that. But there are also moments where she gets humiliated on a tram, or where she struggles to make friends at school, or when she meets someone who becomes very important to her by chance in a bar. I think those moments, partly through living in Manchester and experiencing moments like that, in that landscape, were partly what inspired the redraft, but also just experiencing that more broadly, I suppose. When I was in my first year as a Creative Writing undergrad, I had a lecturer who said over the course of these three years, you’ll all become better writers, and that won’t be because of anything we’ve taught you, more just because you’ve experienced more life. I found that to be very true. 

When I wrote a very early version of the story, I hadn’t experienced much life, and I hadn’t experienced lots of things that I was trying to write about in this story, like love and loss. And then I did experience those things, and they weren’t what I thought they were going to be, which I suppose is always the way, so I redrafted those as well. Then, David Sue, who edited this collection, invited me to submit my story for consideration for the book, and I then re-drafted it, and wrote more of those connections to specific places and environments into the story, which hopefully made it better.

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The stories in this collection shift the focus from the ‘thrilling quietude’ and ‘struggles of ordinary residents’ in the city in juxtaposition to the hustle and bustle many people associate with Manchester, and I really love the way that your story captured this. How did you find writing about this version of the city?

In the time that I lived in Manchester, which is only six years, it’s changed so much. When I lived in Hulme, the first place I lived in Manchester, Hulme towers were being built. When I first moved in, it was just the scaffolding, and by the time I moved out, a year later, the towers were up. And I just think that’s a perfect metaphor for my experience of the city. But also, there’s always a cost to that change, and I think when you’re talking about change, and people always talk about improvement, and I think it’s always progress, and it’s always progress for whom. 

I work with a lot of vulnerable people and people experiencing homelessness, and I see how the city has become, in some ways, less welcoming to those people in its architecture, not necessarily in the character of the people, but certainly in the architecture which I’ve seen become more hostile to people. The cost of living in the UK, as anyone who lives here knows, has skyrocketed in the last few years, and that’s really changed the landscape of the city. Though I’m very, very fond of Manchester. It’s what I mean when I talk about home now, even though I spent most of my life living somewhere else. 

Homelessness is very common in Manchester. One in 74 people are experiencing homelessness in Manchester, which is a shocking statistic. Across the UK. It’s one in 200 which is still shocking, but it’s really high in Manchester. And that’s not a direct theme of my story, but I am interested in how something can feel like home to some people in a way that nowhere else does, and in another sense, feel very hostile to other people. And that can shift throughout people’s lives, somewhere that once felt like home can cease to feel that way, or vice versa, somewhere that used to feel insignificant can take on a significance for all kinds of reasons, the people that you meet, the experiences that you have. So that’s what I’m interested in, I suppose, how the city can be lots of different things, not just to different people, but to the same people throughout their lives.

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This anthology features lots of incredible writers, Shelagh Delaney, for one. If you’ve had a chance to read it, do you have a particular favourite short story from the anthology?

So I haven’t got to read many of them yet, but I love Shelagh Delaney, and A Taste of Honey was one of the reasons that I first visited Manchester, which is a strange reason, because for anyone who’s seen the film, it’s a very bleak depiction of life in Manchester and Salford. But I just loved the humanity of it and how she depicts how people’s very ordinary lives-that never feel ordinary to you; your life always feels extraordinary because it’s the one that you’re living- are so shaped by these landscapes. I just love Shelagh Delaney, I think she’s incredible. But I’m very excited to hear the other stories. I know that Sophie Parkes is reading [at the launch], her story’s also set in Ancoats, where I now live, and I loved her blog entry so I’m very excited about that.

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My final question is have you got any advice that you’d give to any students or readers at aAh! who might be interested in writing a short story of their own?

My main advice is just to read as many as you can, which is such cliche advice, probably very irritating, but you can learn so much from reading other people’s work and really paying attention to what you like and what you don’t like, and what you think works, and what you think doesn’t. I think I have quite eclectic taste in not just writing, but art generally. One thing that I think all of the people whose art I really love have in common is that they’re so knowledgeable about not just their form, but art in general, you know, they’re voracious readers or listeners of music or watchers of theatre, and I think that’s so important in terms of gaining that breadth of knowledge. 

There are many writers who I’m definitely indebted to, and there are certainly five or six that make me think I would be a very different writer if I’d never encountered their work. It’s exciting when you find a writer that you’re excited by and it makes you think about writing in a different way. There have been a few writers who’ve done that for me. Ali Smith is my favourite writer, Jeremy Dyson, who I mentioned, who writes very surprising stories. There’s a great horror writer called Robert Aickman, who’s not very well known now, but he’s an extremely talented writer. Sayaka Murata, who’s a Japanese writer, writes these very forthright horrifying stories, which are incredible. 

Other art forms as well, one of my favourite storytellers is Neil Hannon from the band The Divine Comedy, who I mention in the blog, he’s just an incredible storyteller. It’s what I love about his music, and I have definitely approached writing differently since discovering his work. So it doesn’t just have to be short stories, I think any art can be really influential.

And to just do it, not to wait until you see a call for a publication you want to submit to. I have so many notes app drafts in my phone of just little things I’ve written when I’ve seen something that has sparked a thought, and I felt compelled to follow it and then just left it in my notes app. But if you keep doing that, then you develop your voice, and you develop a habit which is the hardest thing I think, especially if you’re too busy with studies or with work, to find inspiration. So yeah, following it where you find it, even if it’s just things that you can’t follow for more than a couple of 100 words, flash fiction is very popular now, and is a form that I love. So that’s two pieces of advice!

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You can purchase a copy of The Book of Manchester online at Comma Press.