From the churchyard, above the surrounding brick wall, I can see a charity shop. Crossing the road to look in the window, I can see a display of books and old china plates. The books are “Marilyn: A Life In Pictures,” a John McEnroe autobiography and an encyclopaedia of Elvis shows. The old china plates are covered in pictures of pheasants.

Walking the wrong way down the one-way street, I pass two butchers, an optician, a bank and the bus stop where people wait at all times of the day, regardless of the schedule. If it’s raining, they wait under the archway entrance of the bakery and are often tempted to go inside by the smell of Portuguese custard tarts. Continuing on through the square I have to move out of the way of two schoolchildren and their mother. The mother says, “Hurry up, I’m absolutely soaked.” It’s starting to rain.

The daughter says, “You’re soaked?”

And the son says, “I’ve been waiting outside for you to pick me up. I’m soaked.”

“Oh shut up. I’m cold, too,” is the final word from the mother.

As I leave the square I see a sign on the metal fence around the square that reads, Dale Bublé, Michael Bublé tribute act – ‘You won’t get better than Dale!’

*

It is easy to mock the place where I grew up. I was born in Santiago, educated on the outskirts of London, and I’ve lived in New York. It’s hard to kick the habit of damning the countryside village for its cross-eyed people, its unpleasant smells and the historically-supported rumors of incest and bestiality.

Attleborough can seem like a one-horse town compared to the other locations I’ve mentioned. And if you’re a fan of horses, or, like me, arrogantly think that you deserve to be surrounded by hordes of like-minded horses who want to pay you to produce and perform your creative work, then a one-horse town can too easily be the butt of jokes muttered under your breath as you watch local families walk away from the town square.

*

Crossing the road on the south side of the square is like playing a game of chicken. Cars are eager to swing around the diner on the corner and into the path of pedestrians leaving the square. Not today though. I cross safely.

In front of me is a frame shop; I’ve only ever seen the owners inside. Anyone who wanted anything framed in this town has long since achieved that aim. Outside the diner next door sits a man dressed like a cowboy, complete with hat, boots and bolo tie and another man perpetually on a motorized mobility scooter. But that doesn’t hinder him. He has learned to lean sideways toward his table to eat his full English breakfast.

I have to navigate more than two crossings to get to where I want to go, because the one-way system meets with a double-lane road and creates an island. I walk to the island, where there is a war memorial covered in names of local people not lucky enough to have lived such a humdrum life.

Joining the circular route around the one-way system again, I have to stop in the road inches away from an oncoming car because someone who is incredibly overweight is talking to a person with a wheeled-basket full of bottles and frozen meat. The cars are too close for comfort, and as I attempt to circumnavigate the couple who are cheerily talking about a mutual friend, perhaps relative, who’s getting closer to death every day, I catch a glimpse of the local newspaper on top of the shopping.

“Lack of fame is no barrier to Attleborough author”, it read. A picture of a purple-haired elderly lady perched behind a stack of her eight-volume autobiography accompanied it.

*

It’s a logical fallacy to think that the only way to be a productive and successful writer is to live in the city, or to live among famous people. Jennifer Meakin, the autobiography writer, does not prove that point, however, or embody it, because her writing is not successful in monetary or publicity terms. She isn’t the type of writer I want to be and doesn’t have the career that I would be satisfied with. But what she has done is taken a small slice of life and attempted to show it to the wider world. The humble aim of every writer, surely?

My point isn’t to chuck stones at our heroic Jennifer, or to champion the country bumpkin, saying that everyone lives a valuable life or that creativity can pop up in the most unexpected places. That’s certainly no more true just because one old lady decided to write about her life in the quiet corner of the English countryside.

Just because a place might seem less than ideal for an ambitious writer (quiet when I want loud, slow when I want fast), does not mean that I can’t write a couple of pages about it and allow someone on the other side of the world to see a little more of this side. If only once a reader in Austin, Texas can see the words, Attleborough, Norfolk, UK, and think for a moment about the countryside vicar as he rushes back to church, then it seems as if bringing the world closer together is not as impossible as it might seem.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, drama and drawing comics.

The post A Place You’ve Never Heard Of: Attleborough, Norfolk, UK appeared first on Newfound.

After finishing I had to reconfigure myself to reality again. Convince myself that I was not living in the novel’s world. After three-hundred or so pages of intense first-person description of this small, hopelessly intertwined community, that was no mean feat.

Detachment (then reattachment) from the real world is a required state-of-being for a reader. This becomes more true when one is also a writer. To write one must be able to switch between being a solitary, isolated figure, battling one’s own thoughts and writing the best down, and being a public figure, throwing words out into the crowd, defending them, knowing and fearing one will be judged personally for them. It’s a troubling, but inevitable, state of affairs.

For an MFA student, it’s consoling to think that this struggle between the public and private self is one all writers must go through. Or at least, it was a consoling thought until I remembered that it’s only true for most writers. And Ferrante isn’t one of them.

There are a number of writers who self-eradicate. Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and J.D. Salinger are a few, but they seem like vicious, fame-hungry dogs compared to Ferrante. At least we know their names are real.

Her ability to live completely in the shadows and not be tempted to even do a telephone interview is admirable. It is also, I am sorry to admit, infuriating.

I say this because during my MFA program my coursemates and I have been told weekly that the odds are against us. Indeed, even in my undergraduate course, my class were told that out of the twenty of us, half a person, statistically, would go on to publish. (Which half of which person was the question that sprang to mind before the reality of the words set in.)

If we were one of the lucky ones (or halves), we were told that it would be down to a great deal of self-promotion and hard work. In short, talent wasn’t going to be enough to ensure we were rewarded. That’s fine, I thought. It’s comforting to know that you need talent and tenacity to succeed. I’ll just try extra hard to promote my work and success is sure to come.

But then along came Ferrante. Not only has she been the lucky half-person in the class, but that lucky half won the lottery and struck oil. She undoubtedly has the talent, but she just gets to sit back and see her book sell itself. Her own privacy seems to be the fuel for her unstoppable popularity machine. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Obviously, it’s jealousy I feel, because she gets to choose how to live. But there is another more troubling reason that I resent Ferrante’s ability to relax into a life lived on her terms.

If I didn’t resent it, and I didn’t want anonymity and peace and to think of myself as entirely the writer I am, then what would I want? Fame and fortune? Honors and awards? As nice as those things would be, I don’t think they are the kind of things a (good) writer’s career is built on.

I’m forced to admit: what I want is to be successful enough that I can spurn the very fame I’m telling myself I don’t want. Oh dear.

I hope I speak for all of us in the “emerging writers” category, those who have no more of an idea of their future career trajectory than they do quantum physics, when I say all of this. For us, the very idea of having someone read our work is a blessing. To be asked to read it to others, therefore, is a privilege that dreams are currently made of. To be so in demand that one can turn these things, or one must turn them down to preserve the regularity of life is a pipe-dream that one can only entertain for a few minutes a day if one wants to stay sane.

Ferrante, then, should not be the person we take career advice from, unless we wish to drive ourselves mad.

Now as the guilt sets in, it’s reached the point where I should come clean: I’m not a petulant child, jealous of the success I don’t yet have and ungrateful for the peaceful life I currently live. This isn’t about jealousy, or ingratitude, or even my great respect for a writer of such intricate and enthralling stories. It’s about hope. The worst and best thing Ferrante did was give me hope.

At some point, a teacher told her that only half of a person in her class might publish and she would have to sell her soul to do so. And she looked them square in the face and said no (or maybe no, in an Italian accent) and told them she could publish, and she could do it on her own terms. So, there’s hope for me yet. In spite of everything I know about the publishing world. If she did it, and did it her own way, then why can’t I? Damn her, damn her, why can’t I?

Josh King is a second-year MFA student at Adelphi University in New York, and moved from the UK in 2014. He divides his time between writing fiction and sampling the New York literary scene. He also writes a column for London’s Litro Magazine.

The post Envy, Ingratitude and Hope: Why Elena Ferrante is a Bad Role Model appeared first on Newfound.