A Ship of Fools
Some time in 2006 I decided to take stock of the stuff I'd been writing. I looked through my files and pulled out my favourite stories and poems. I added a few of the very short pieces I'd started writing over the summer together with my long story Entertaining Angels. As was bound to happen, I found they fell into a number of categories which are explored in more detail elsewhere on this site. Thus I had some bits on jazz, some on travel and some based on chance encounters with kids usually on the fringe of school life.
The collection starts with a couple of fairy tales which I sort of chopped up and served up as new. For a time I was interested in the work of Angela Carter and I think her fairy tale collections are intriguing. However, I can't pretend there's much Carter in my Rumpelstilstkin or A Dwarf Writes. Definitely no Disney either. Brecht? OK more than a little maybe.
The collection also has one of my favourite stories - Charlie wants a Peach. This comes under the Travel heading, but also owes much to a bit of research I did on Rabelais, Carnival and that sort of thing. The title poem is very odd. It isn't really about anything. It's a sort of ritual nursery rhyme which has more than a hint of Coleridge in it. It was written especially for the book.
The title? I'm a bit embarrassed by this actually. I just liked the way the phrase A Ship of Fools sounded. It wasn't until after I put the book out that I remembered where I'd heard it before. No, not a fifteenth century German satire, although that is its true origin. It came to me one night that it was the name of a small publishing imprint used by my Writing Studies Tutor, Rob Sheppard! He's now Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University. Anyway I emailed him over the matter and he hasn't complained.
The photo on the cover? I took a snapshot of this strange chap behaving very oddly in New York's Central Park. It wasn't a very good photograph, but I played around with it, flared some colour, cropped and enlarged a bit and the result is what you can see.
If you would like a copy of A Ship of Fools please CLICK HERE to email me
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A Ship of Fools is just £5.50 including P&P in the UK. (The cost of deliveries outside the UK will obviously vary according to the price of postage.)
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