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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/sarah-gridley-addressee   ADDRESSEE   I mind less that you go far away in time Once I had to harden myself to the idea Now I ask more of it, and you, and the carryover Those I find time for presently do not bring this cup of stars your listening makes Few of us are free of petty necessity, hurts spun back to inflictions, ambition rocking to exhausted desire I worry less that I’m not into this I love the curtain between us The old space of sailing, the birds that fly so far from land      https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/sarah-gridley-origin-is-your-original-sin   Origin is Your Original Sin —AR Ammons   Not to have touched your starting point Never to have reached for where you are To renounce ever splitting a single fruit in half Never to have fooled yourself or others To have no cause for redirection To let alone the long odds and the favourable Not to be this or that Neither spatialised or spiritualised To leave your bear in the eternal winter dream of spring Not to emerge Never to mate or part with time Not to be licked into shape, never to mind the branching acts, the superstitious rags you might have tied to trees beside the wells Never around the mossy depth of wells Never a question of holiness, the steadfast eye of subterranean water Never to wear entanglements of air and blood Never to see the salmon leap To feel no difference between up and down To get the soporific movement of the sea but neither its lifting or breaking dreams Never to feel the velvet curtain dropping at the end To touch as near

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


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Interview

November 2011

Interview with Margaret Jull Costa

Sam Gordon

Interview

November 2011

On first impressions, this interview with Margaret Jull Costa, happening as it did – for the most part –...

feature

June 2014

A Grenade for River Plate

Juan Pablo Meneses

TR. Jethro Soutar

feature

June 2014

El Polaco appears brandishing his Stanley, as he lovingly calls his pocket knife. Five young hooligans huddle round him...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Manfred Mohr

Alice Hattrick

Interview

Issue No. 1

Lines of varying thickness rotate on black. On the screen beside, tilted away from the first, is a slide...

 

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