This week at Valley Press, #62: 'The Eagle'

Dear readers,

I must start by thanking everyone for the outpouring of kind words after our last email. I've included another Helen Cadbury poem at the end of this post, in a different genre; a childhood anecdote in fact (showing the great storytelling skill everyone's been talking about in the past week, along with a 'Twinkle' of humour).

After a few requests, I turned last week's poem, 'The Dance', into an image which can be easily shared on social media (find that here). The family have asked that donations in Helen's memory go to Accessible Arts and Media, York, a brilliant organisation which Helen chaired for a number of years – details here.

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Elsewhere at Valley Press, Helen Burke's twenty-month wait to see her Collected Poems is almost at an end – hardback copies arrived in the VP office on Thursday (see picture above). An ebook is also available now. The hardback, after all this effort, is priced at £30... but we realise that is a touch steep, so for the next few weeks you can all have 20% off using the discount code BIRDIES.

In other new releases: Mountain Stories is "officially" published today, and should be appearing on bookshop shelves across the UK. For those who've already ordered, I hope you find it as intriguing and entertaining as we did. A sample can be found here, if you've not yet read anything from our new Chinese translation series. We're working on the second volume at the moment; I have the final manuscript in my hand.

This week also saw the release of our third audiobook publication. We invited Norah Hanson over to Scarborough to record her latest collection Sparks, using the brilliant studio/production setup at Tom Townsend's Village Records. We did take after take of each poem until they were perfect, and the results are available on Amazon, Audible and iTunes now for just a few pounds – less than a posh coffee! Give it a try.

If free entertainment is more your style, VP authors Sue Wilsea and Nora Chassler recently visited the Valley Press office, and graciously agreed to film video interviews, answering the questions from TV programme 'Inside the Actor's Studio'. (In the video, I credit them to James Lipton, but have since learned he borrowed them from a man called Pivot... who in turn lifted them from Proust. So more literary than you'd think.) You can see Sue's video here and Nora's here.

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I'm about to embark on an email holiday for a few weeks, starting Sunday – I'll be keeping one eye on the workings of Valley Press though, and still doing the occasional meeting/event (so don't panic if we've got one booked!) The next few newsletters will be from enterprising interns and other VP staff, so look out for some lively new voices in your inbox. Enjoy those, and the poem below – see you in August.

All best,
Jamie McGarry, VP Publisher

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The Wrong Label

by Helen Cadbury, from Forever, Now (published November 2017)

The Christmas I unwrapped an Eagle annual
there was Dan Dare, all black lines, strong jaw,
the Mekon, slime-green, repulsive, sucking me in.
Each comic strip a rush of danger, thrill of speed.

Minutes in to this new-found joy, a cry went up,
my brother sat with a Twinkle annual in his lap.
I fought my case, ruined Christmas with my argument,
and lost. These things happen, simple mistake.

I flicked the pages of Twinkle, where fat-faced
children smiled pink-lipped smiles, cherubic.
I was having none of it. I spent the afternoon
plotting how to make the Eagle mine.

This week at Valley Press: spotlight on 'The Boy in the Mirror'

Dear readers,

Back in September, we published The Boy in the Mirror by Tom Preston; a hugely original memoir about being treated for stage 4 cancer, written in the second person. It's become clear since then (and I had a suspicion at the time) that this is one of the most important books VP has published so far – you might remember one reviewer saying it "should become the go-to recommended reading for the friends and family of a cancer sufferer", which is quite a statement.

Unusually, the book is about to have a second round of publicity: it's been shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award, as announced yesterday at a festival in Leicester. For our international readers, I should explain: the East Midlands is a region of England between Yorkshire and the south – you could have guessed that much, I suppose – and the award was for literary work by writers who live in that region.

With a prize of £1000 at stake, I hope we'll all have our fingers crossed for Tom when they announce the overall winner in June (date to be confirmed). If you live in that region, keep an eye out for any displays relating to the award in bookshops, and let us know.

There's been another development too, coincidentally at exactly the same time – an audiobook version of The Boy in the Mirror has just been released; the very first Valley Press audiobook, ever. This is the result of months of work, not by us but by an audio production company called Storytec (whose director is called Jaime, and went to the same tiny university as me – lots of coincidences today!) It's been expertly narrated by Alex Wyndham, who you might have seen on TV in Rome, The Crimson Field etc; we did auditions and everything. It's been really exciting to see it all come together.

So: let me do you a deal. You can get 20% off the paperback of The Boy in the Mirror all this week, with the code BOY20; and anyone who buys it using that code will get a free copy of the audiobook – I'll email you a voucher which can be used on Audible.co.uk (I can't do the same internationally, sadly). If you need a little more convincing, you can read the book's first chapter here and listen to it here. It's not for the faint-hearted, obviously, but if you want to be challenged by some non-fiction this week, this is your chance.

I don't want to overstay my welcome, but I can't leave without a last plug for The Wild Gods launch event, which is happening tomorrow (Monday 14th) from 7pm, at the Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road in London. Oh – and this was also the week I started a new series of articles, over at Medium.com, which (when read in full) will work as guidelines for making a living as a self-employed literary publisher. If you don't plan on doing that, it may not be of much interest; but 500 people have read the first part already, so it might be more relevant than I thought...

All best,
Jamie McGarry, VP Publisher