Dear readers (and authors),
It's been a while, hasn't it? If this is the first time you're hearing from us since March, don't worry – your emails aren't broken, we've just been very busy with the "meat and potatoes" of publishing, as well as improving our publicity outreach to people who don't follow our work at Valley Press. (I know, it's a terrible affliction, and we're doing all we can to help them.)
Today though, it's time to reach out to our old pals on the mailing list – firstly to tell you that submissions are open until August 20th, and all fiction, non-fiction and poetry manuscripts of 5,000-120,000 words are eligible. There is a fee to submit, with the money being used to fully fund publication of the "winning" books in 2022. (You may recall we tried this on Kickstarter back in the spring, to their initial delight and eventual disapproval – ultimately, it was cancelled before we got anywhere).
You can find full details of how to submit on our FAQ page, but please feel free to get in touch via return email if you have any queries. I am reading all submissions from this window myself, and so far enjoying the experience very much – it's great to be back on the "front line" of contemporary literature, in all its unfiltered glory.
That being said, we mustn't get so excited about the future that we forget to celebrate this year's books! Since the last newsletter we have released all these instant classics (as posed just now on my rainy windowsill):
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They include Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, an all-too-necessary reminder of the existential threat facing life on Earth as we know it. This is the first project from our "Editor-at-Large" Kate Simpson, who has contributed a phenomenally detailed and insightful introduction, as well as collecting original work from the likes of Caroline Bird, Inua Ellams, Pascale Petit, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Rachael Allen, Raymond Antrobus, Mary Jean Chan and many more.
It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for autumn 2021, and has been called a "transformative read" by Daljit Nagra, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. 50p from each copy sold will be donated to Friends of the Earth, the UK's largest grassroots environmental campaigning organisation, in celebration of their 50th anniversary. So in conclusion, I suggest this is as close to a "must-buy" as anything we've published so far; you can get hold of a copy from our website here.
On a lighter and more irreverent note (but only slightly less essential), we have Particles of Wonder, the new collection from Mark Waddell, famous for putting context-free poetic phrases on a sign outside his home in Kentish Town (no really, there have been articles). A typical Waddell poem sees the poet taking a phrase that he likes the sound of (like 'aromatic agnostic') and turning it into a whole alternative universe, described with impeccable comic timing and utter disregard for convention. Like a lot of our publications, this book needs to be read to be understood, and I'll share some extracts with you in the near future. In the meantime, you can find out more here.
I'll also need to share a carefully-chosen chapter or two of Stephen Reynold's The Layers, a novel which both is and isn't as intense as its cover suggests. Setting out to "de-normalise loss", it describes an identity crisis caused by losing too many people – and as a result, too many versions of yourself – until you are at risk of fading away completely. But it also highlights the joy and beauty of our most important relationships, and the imprints they leave behind even after they are gone; it's life-affirming, like a certain classic Christmas film from the '40s (you know the one). You can read more here; it's available in paperback and on Kindle, with an audio version coming soon.
There's already an audio version of Wherever We Are When We Come to the End, a visionary poetic experiment from Richard Barnett reimagining Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical masterpiece, the Tractatus, as a war poem. ('The war saved my life,' Wittgenstein once said, 'I don't know what I'd have done without it'.) Happily, the literary magazine Hotel has selected and beautifully formatted an extract from this book for you to read here, and you can pick up a paperback copy from the VP shop here.
Lastly, but far from leastly, we have two new publications from the ever-expanding Centre for Writing at York St John's university, which has gone from strength to strength since the mid-pandemic launch of their MA in Publishing. This year's edition of Beyond the Walls features (as ever) teams of undergraduates editing the work of more senior students, responding to the topic of "resilience" in all its forms. Then there's the York Literary Review, with hundreds of submissions from around the world edited into a high-quality and hugely entertaining anthology by the MA Publishing students. If, like me, you want to know what people are really writing right now, there's no better place to start than these two publications.
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Finally, and at the risk of overstaying my welcome, I must give an honourable mention to one of last year's titles, the unforgettable Suitable Love Object by Rebecca Swift, which was recently announced as a National Poetry Day recommendation and will be appearing in various promotional materials produced for this year's celebration (7th October). Keep an eye out for sightings of the book and coverage in the coming months.
There's probably lots of other news I've overlooked, but hopefully it won't be quite so long until I'm in touch again. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy any of the above books you are able to treat yourself to, and the very best of luck to anyone who enters our submissions window. Until next time, take care, and keep reading!
— JM
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