My love for books started at an early age. Though I didn’t grow up with the bookshelves that I have today, I was encouraged to read, read to and told stories which I sometimes think of as my own personal fairy tales, passed down the generations, and which we continue to tell each other and our own children to keep them alive. Sometimes, I put these stories into my own stories. When I talk about those stories at events, people will come up to me and tell me versions of their own or say – “I remember being told that as a kid.” People are especially complimentary of my use of the regional dialect and idioms synonymous with Stoke-on-Trent when I often say my first language was pottery. You can’t tell a story from Stoke, I say, without telling it with the accent it was born with.
The place you grew up in is filled with stories that have been passed down and passed on be them urban myths or what I might call – the really did happen tales. I was always told the story of the little girl who got chewing gum stuck in her windpipe as a way to avoid the gobstoppers and Bazooka bubbly I coveted in Mr Hunt’s sweetshop. The story of my Nan slipping on a chip up Barmouth made it’s way into my debut novel, Sitting Ducks, as my second novel Pondweed took the family story of my great-granny meeting her childhood sweetheart she had thought lost to the first world war at the bus stop some seventy odd years later (they got married, by the way). This project has not only started to reconnect me with my literary heritage but reminded me of the power and value of a story that is told or read and, like the fairy tales, continues to roam a city’s streets and even travel beyond. I’ve even started to see more clearly where those early authors’ voices ended and mine began. As Bennett had his own way of translating the city in fiction, the stories I was told have become my version of telling this city’s history.
100 Books in a 100 Years has been on the road itself this past month travelling to York, to the Byline festival and to the city’s libraries. I’ve had the opportunity of telling more people about the project who live or don’t live in the area, raising the project’s profile, and connecting with other writers who, like me, draw from their hometown as a place for storytelling. I’ve always thought of Stoke-on-Trent as a rich landscape for stories and have been guilty of mining those pits and pots for the poetry and prose that has always existed beneath the graft and gritty exteriors whilst imaging things as otherwise. But then, I was incredibly lucky to grow up in a family that loved and still loves to talk; a pot-bank generation who can spin a yarn and keep those we have loved and lost alive.
Earlier this month, I was invited to deliver a paper at the English Shared Futures conference in York. This conference was all about the importance of studying the discipline of literature, or, a love of books and what they can inspire. I was on a panel with the Reading Agency, a national consortium of programmes and campaigns to inspire personal and social change through the power of reading. As it says on their website:
Reading makes us more aware and informed. It helps us grow our imaginations. It makes us more empathetic and understanding of other people and cultures. It supports our health and wellbeing. It increases our ability to learn new skills. It helps us communicate our ideas more effectively. It opens doors. It’s a source of huge enjoyment.
Their presentation delivered plenty of horrifying (to me) statistics, enough to warrant the government’s declaration that 2026 is to be the National Year of Reading. But what has stuck with me about this presentation, like Darrell Rivers has stuck with me since I first chomped my way through Malory Towers as an eight year old, was a word they kept on using: Bibliotherapy.
I realised that I had been talking about this for a while but had not found my own word for it. Post Covid, I had started to use the phrase – ‘it all begins with a word’ – having been struck by how the arts had stepped in and stepped up during those horrendous and various lockdowns where some, not all, picked up books to escape into, borrowed or bought (and mind-boggling so) Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ when, as Samuel Earle wrote in The New Statesman: “sometimes we turn to novels to make sense of our world, and sometimes to escape it. Yet in hard times, we often ask them to do both at once: to make sense of our world, all the better to escape it.”
We were also binging Netflix and BBC box sets on a daily basis. We watched classic films we’d never had the time or inclination to see what all the fuss was about. We tuned into the National Theatre Live, zoomed into webinars that replaced our literary festivals and Grayson Perry’s Art club was a thing of pure brilliance. Some of us even found ourselves googling The Lancet medical journal for the first time in our lives. Poetry, in particular, had a renaissance.
All of these art forms, which they are, began with a word written by a writer who added some more words to create a story be it fiction or fact. So when, at a university open day when we were back on campus and still social distancing, I was asked if Creative Writing was even a valid degree, I found myself saying that we forget, and it’s really no-one’s fault that we do, that most of our entertainment, information, preservation of histories and communication begins with a writer who had an idea for a story because of a story that was happening or one they’d once heard and then sometimes imagined the rest.
I’m a big believer in Bibliotherapy, a way, according to researchers, to ‘furnish the mind’ and a term that is itself over 100years old, coined by the American essayist and minister, Samuel McChord Crothers, in a 1916 essay entitled “A Literary Clinic”. But then I am biased because I’m lucky enough to see it happening in my job. I borrowed the term when talking about this project at the 2025 Byline Festival a week later – a festival in dialogue with the stories we’re not hearing and the stories that have defined our politics and world histories. I mentioned one of the project’s aims once the canon was in place because imagine! A citywide 100Book Club and 6 Book Reading Challenge. And then imagine! A community-based course on our local literature that provides a space for telling your own stories for others to read that will ensure the canon’s continuation into the next century. I invited along local author Debbi Voisey to read from her work and talk about how and why she wrote and how the city and it’s literary heritage had inspired her.
I saw this start to happen with the 3 x July micro-residencies hosted by our phenomenal libraries and some of Stoke-on-Trent’s leading authors. Mel Sherratt, Natalie Linh Bolderston and Jonathan Taylor, winner of this year’s Arnold Bennett prize, all returned to the libraries that had meant most to them growing up to pass on their stories of becoming a writer, and sharing their experience through workshops, drop-ins and Q&As. We welcomed the local writing groups, the amazing rota of volunteers who keep Trentham library afloat and open, young aspiring writers, and those who’d just popped in out of curiosity then stayed for the duration. We discussed crime writing, poetry and drawing from the personal and place in memoir. All pointed out the significance of the Potteries to their work as if it were a storytelling capital. Many wrote things that had been on their mind for a while or things that came out of nowhere. For some, it was a family fairy tale destined to travel. It felt like a community. People left with new friends and promises of coffee and maybe some scribbling. Call it what you will, but it had all begun with a word.
Get Stoked About Writing
This month’s prompt asks for the focus upon one of the city’s many urban myths that has travelled through your family’s generations like your very own Potteries-based fairy tale. Write it down then ask yourself: How might it become the story’s main element? Maybe one of your characters recalls it to another to explain something: Perhaps it is the story’s revelation. Think of this story as a vagabond that continues to roam so where is it headed next?
This month I’m shining a narrative spotlight on the poet Kevin Mellor and his works Ramblings of a Free Man volumes 1 & 2. I am admittedly, and shamefully late to Mellor’s work but am glad for his contacting me for his potential inclusion in the canon and love the idea of poetry as ramblings when us writers ramble like troubadours and vagabonds through our own personal histories to find the stories we want to tell, and take our readers on that journey with us.
29th July 2025