Different For Boys by Patrick Ness

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This feels so fresh so I was surprised when looking up Patrick Ness’ other work this was first published in a short story collection back in 2010 – that it was written at a mid point between today and the days when I was a confused queer teenager perhaps explains something of its power.

This edition has illustrations by Tea Bendix which are often layered and sketchy which seems to capture the dynamic so well, the narrative overlaps at times, never really gives you the full story.

It is told in the voice of Ant, who talks to us, breaks the fourth walk as it were, it is the story for 4 boys sat around a table at school – Ant, Charlie, Freddie, and Jack.

It uses redactions cleverly – most of the swear words are blacked out, as are the details of the sex acts – asking us to fill in the blanks, very aware of which words I decided to put in the space – you are involved in an act of co-creation?

Freddie is perhaps the hero – when the redacted word hits the fan he just asks Ant to rugby practice the same way he has been asking all along – straight blokes get a bad press and a lot of the time rightly so, but the Freddies out there are different, they would never make a song and dance about it but their allyship is transformational.

In some ways Charlie is the villain of the piece, and yet of the four of them he is the one you are left worrying about – Ant has Freddie and Jack who will in their different ways support the journey of reconciliation with who they really are. Meanwhile Charlie has isolated himself and that is a downward pathway.

163 Days by Hannah Hodgson

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The sequence titled 163 Days contains a parallel narration of her experience in hospital, what she is experiencing and what is being recorded in her medical notes. These are often disconnected in ways that make you both sorrowful and deeply angry – it is a reminder that if you are in anyway vulnerable or marginalise don’t trust doctors – not because doctors are bad people, but they are pushed to do too much too quickly which drives them to making judgements that don’t take account for anything or anyone that needs time to listen more closely, to slow down, to stop and ask again.

The second section, After Care, is perhaps more hopeful, it is not rosy by any means, but there is more autonomy over the challenges – I tagged a fairly dark poem titled Death Inc which recounts an induction session into the afterlife that has all the features of the worse kind of corporate “experience” - asking you to complete a feedback form before you have walking in the door etc

Journeying Out by Ann Morisy

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This book was published in 2004, and I think has been on the “to read” list for most of the decades since, such that its subtitle “A new approach to Christian Mission” has been overtaken a bit – this new approach is now widely adopted.

That social engagement in your community is a key tool for mission was in reality hardly a “new” idea even then, but the growing need within our communities, since the financial crash in 2008 and accelerating in the wake of Covid, means that Churches are doing more and more to address acute and chronic needs around them.

But while there is a strong advocacy for Churches being on the front line there is also an important reframing of how we engage. There is an opportunity for Churches to not just meet peoples needs, but to empower them, to work with them not for them. Sometimes those in need and those with opportunity to meet needs end up in an unhelpful power dynamic – we meet peoples needs in the ways in which we think are best for them rather than letting them make choices for themselves.

In their chapter on “The Suburban Challenge” Ann notes that “Anxiety is an organizing principle for our lives… Even the reassurance of eternal life, which I rejoice in, does not stop my primitive, animal response of anxiety… The more life is experienced as sorted, the greater the fear that something will come and upset the applecart.” (p100) This might be a simplification, but there is an important need for Churches to have a message for the comfortable.

Overall it was an effective articulation of a message that I subscribed to already.

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan

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This is a story of family, the closeness and the distance that can exist. We can be so close to those we love and yet at moments be strangers to them.

There is also the dynamic of the rural tenant and landlord – close neighbours over generations, and yet an unequal relationship, one could put the other out of their home essentially on a whim.

There is an exploration of race, how does a black man fit into this rural community?

And, in a spoiler, there is a final revelation of a same-sex love.

There is a lot going on in this book and I think I read parts of it while rather tired and so found it hard to really get to grips with the richness of it properly.

Foundry Songs by Dean Rhetoric

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This is a collection with a heavy emotional load – it deals with physical illness, it deals with the complexities of identity

An example

Silk Cut

Look, sometime we let a little trauma

salt the meat of the men we become

when we were boys

every son on the street

was a murderer

suffocating their softest parts

so their friends

had less of them to hurt

unbuttoning buildings

to sneak upstairs

past curfew

if caught

their cries for mercy

were tested on the damn birds

until the damn birds

were broken

The Sense of Movement by Thom Gunn

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I put tags in

The Beaters

its final stanza

The lips that meet the wound can finally

Justify nothing – neither pain nor care;

Tender upon the shoulders ripe with blood.

Jesus and his Mother

it describes the Annunciation thus

He seemed much like another man,

That silent foreigner who trod

Outside my door with lily rod:

How could I know what I began

Meeting the eyes more furious than

The eyes of Joseph, those of God?

I was my own and not my own.

The Corridor

which plays on watching and being watched – one looks through a keyhole, the voyeur is seen...