All that Nottingham’s literary scene was missing, said poet Rory Waterman, was a “name-brand literary journal”. Grace Sanders speaks to Andrew Tucker Leavis, Editor-in-Chief of the New Nottingham Journal, about how he decided to rectify that issue, with LeftLion’s help…
Now that the journal has officially launched, how are you feeling about it?
I’m finally catching up on some sleep!
50% of UK adults read for pleasure – that’s 21 million people – but literary journals often seem to target a narrow audience. The goal was to collect great writing – fiction, non-fiction and poetry – and to lob it into people’s hands, whether they are followers of capital L ‘Literature’ or not. It does seem to be happening, at last!
As you went through the editing process, did you notice an underlying theme or connection throughout any of the submissions?
Early on I mentioned to a couple of people who’d asked that ‘birth’, or ‘rebirth’, might become a focus. In my introduction I write about the phoenix – DH Lawrence’s chosen emblem – and that it doesn’t, strictly speaking, live forever – it’s constantly being reborn, cremated, and uncremated.
I think print publications are like that too: when you start a new one, you’re not drawing a blueprint on thin air but over the faint outlines of all that’s gone before you in this city. Janet Gunter wrote her New Nottingham Journal piece about ‘phoenix trees’, recumbent trees which fall over and keep growing. Amy Acre’s poetry deals with the mixed emotions of motherhood. There’s a lot in Issue One about how new things begin.
What was the most challenging part of the editing process for you?
This ‘newness’ also became a challenge – I’ve not made a book before, so it was all a baptism of fire – from typesetting, to print-checking, to fine-tuning the design, to distributing… my naïveté combined with the rigid deadline meant that the whole thing has felt like a bootcamp, where other people’s money, pledged in good faith on Kickstarter, was at stake. Still, I’m chuffed with how it’s come out, and that’s down to the quality of the pieces which were entrusted to us. I knew we’d always have that to fall back on.
The journal began as your solo passion project, but has now grown into a collaborative effort. What are your hopes or plans for Issue Two of the journal? Are there any particular themes or directions you would like to explore with it?
Yes, we now have an editorial team rather than an editorial person, so that’s a discussion I’m looking forward to having as a group. Kibrina Davey, Martin Fitzgerald, Hannah Cox, and George Newton are the new team, and I’m sure they’ll all bring their own perspectives. Personally I will be lobbying to see some biting satire in Issue Two…
This would never have worked as a total solo project. It’s In Nottingham sponsored Issue One, and we had massive support all the way through from our partners LeftLion, Nottingham City of Literature, NTU, UoN and Bad Betty Press; and of course Nottingham Central Library, who hosted our launch event.
As our conversations move online, a book stays a physical object – it has a presence, it’s from somewhere
That launch event was a massive success. What were your highlights from the evening?
Like most events, from bar mitzvahs to greyhound races, this was mainly an excuse to get a big group together with drinks in their hands. So the best bit for me was seeing the conversations which were going on, which I hope were an opportunity for new connections to be formed. A second, but very related point, was the amount of love and mutual support in the room. That sense of the scaffold of our creative community – that’s not unique to Nottingham per se, but I don’t think it exists everywhere to this degree. I don’t know if it’s kindness or necessity, but we do tend to champion each other.
I know you have a strong sense of pride in Nottingham as your home city, do you feel the journal channels or reflects this in some way?
I think you have to be mindful when leaning into an ‘underdog’ narrative that it doesn’t become a chip on your shoulder. That said, there’s something to it: I suspect we’re fundamentally a northern city, in that we lost our lace and coal industries, our seeming raisons d'être, and they were never quite replaced.
A lot of our figures in our cultural pantheon – the 19th century Robin of Locksley, reshaped to fight Norman oppressors; the Luddites; the nihilism of Smith in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, I think they reflect an instinctive resistance to being patronised.
As our conversations move online, a book stays a physical object – it has a presence, it’s from somewhere. Inevitably, whatever character that place has will be stamped upon it. The forms that that will take are still to be seen, and what I’m looking forward to most in the future is discovering the colour of the new writing that people will send to us.
Issue 1 of the New Nottingham Journal is available online, as well as Five Leaves Bookshop, Bromley House Library and the Tourist Centre, published on LeftLion’s Agamemnon imprint.
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