The project I’m currently working on is run by the writing development agency for the North of England, New Writing North. A Writing Chance aims to open access to the writing industries for new and aspiring writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds, and for those who face barriers due to intersecting challenges. I met Stu Hennigan, a working-class writer living and working as a senior librarian in Leeds, through this project.
Hennigan is known for non-fiction. However, I think it’s his fiction that people should read. He writes about working-class lives in the North in the vernacular with beautiful Douglas Stuart-like phrasing.
In this story, Jonny meets up with his childhood friend Nat, who he hasn’t seen in months because she disappeared leaving a note asking him not to try and find her.
“In another world they’d have been childhood sweethearts. They were spawned at opposite ends of a scruffbag terrace where what passed for gardens sprouted fucked fridges instead of flowers and every other house had at least one gaffertaped binbag where a window should’ve been. Devonshire Street, it was called. Folk said it was named after a Duke or summat, whatever one of them was.”
When Nat eventually contacts Jonny from Brighton, he saves up and makes his way there. We sit with them on a beach near the charred remnants of a burnt-out West Pier as they get drunk and high.
Though Hennigan lays out rusty, unshiny lives, his characters do not seek pity. He refuses to sugarcoat his stories or make them redemptive to appeal to middle-class readers, saying he’s against “reductive, stereotypical crap”. Hennigan believes that the best endings are ambiguous, which I happen to think too; good writing should make people think.
At the end of this story, Nat flings off her clothes, completely wasted, and heads out into the sea, even though she can’t swim. Jonny, who can’t swim either, has no choice but to follow her. The scene brings to mind one of my favourite songs, The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’: “He saw her shoulders go under and threw himself forward but she was just out of reach, his fingers grasping empty air and as a fuck-off wave rolled up, crested, poised, a heartbeat from shrouding the tranquilized gaze of the bored, uncaring sky.”
‘Shit Life Syndrome’ was praised by an editor at The New Yorker as a “work of evident merit”. I suspect it’s too peculiarly British to strike a chord in the States, but a publisher here should pick it up. We need more stories like this, and work of this merit should be published.
Awaiting publication
A Personal Anthology 