00:00Brendan Hawthorne, hello sir. Hello, how are you doing? I'm good, cheers buddy. We're here in Wensbury by the iconic clock.
00:07Now I know you as a Wensbury Poet Laureate, a musician, I didn't realise a storyteller as well.
00:15You've got your first book of short stories. That's right, yeah. A collection called Synapse, which has been on the Anvil for about 10 years with the illustrator Jason Falwood.
00:26Okay, he's a Shropshire lad is he? He's from Telford, yeah, he's Telford based.
00:31Fabulous artist, he's done all the cover design and some of the illustrations within.
00:36And it's really the story of an elderly gentleman going through his lives and you're never really quite sure whether these are real events in his life or in past lives.
00:50Whether he's picked something up off the TV or heard a conversation and they're all just coming out as his stories.
00:57So there's a bit of mystery to it? There is, it jumps around a little bit on timeline as well.
01:02So, you know, anything back to First World War, into the future as well. So it's all in there and it all comes together at the end.
01:14So where does the inspiration come from this then? Is it characters you've met over the years or is it just stories you've read and stuff that's seeped in?
01:22No, this particular book has come a lot from dreams I used to have as a child and as an adult.
01:34Some of the things where, you know, like an ice cream van can sound really wonderfully happy, summer or whatever, in this book the ice cream van sound is slightly more sinister.
01:47So it's, you know, it's all of these contradictions throughout.
01:51And how did you find the process then? You know, obviously like you say, poets and songs, was this a doddle for you or is it a totally different ballgame?
02:01No, totally different ballgame. As a dyslexic, I find poetry and songwriting quite easy.
02:12But when it comes to anything longer, I can't retain the information. A lot of dyslexics will tell you this.
02:23And so I had to keep it into short stories. That's why I can't read novels and I can't write novels because I can't retain the storyline.
02:32So this, I think, is about sort of the story length limit that I can work to.
02:37So it really pushed me as a dyslexic and as a writer. It's pushed the patience of Jason because it's been on the anvil for so long.
02:47And through the Year Within nights that we have here at the Orchard, I met up with Stephen Davies from Tenebrous Texts who found out about this book.
03:01And he said, I want that book. I'm publishing it.
03:06So is he a Black Country publisher?
03:08Yeah, absolutely. He's based in Wolverhampton and he's completely supportive of, shall we say, the writers on the edges and the margins.
03:22If people want to get hold of a copy, how do they do that, Brendan?
03:25They can do it through Amazon or directly through me.
03:28Cool. So how do they get hold of you? Is it a Facebooky job?
03:32Well, they can email me. It's brendanhawthorne, or in lowercase, 20 at gmail.com
03:40Awesome work, Brendan. Do you think there might be another book in the offering then?
03:44Or has it kind of exhausted you?
03:46Jason and I are working on the third part. This is the second part.
03:51And we're going to be revisiting what we did many, many years ago to bring up to date.
03:56And Stephen is already looking at bringing out that as a hardback collection as a special series.
