Mailing List


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...

This tenth editorial will be our last Back in February 2011, on launching the magazine, we grandiosely stated that we were ‘creating a space for a new generation to express themselves unconstrained by form, subject, or genre’ In laying out these aims in a preliminary editorial, we in fact constrained ourselves to the tedium of having to come up with something interesting to say with each new issue, having set the precedent   In our second issue, we announced that ‘we are not yet in a position to pay contributors, (or ourselves for that matter)’ Thanks to an Arts Council grant awarded earlier this year, the former is no longer true: we are now able to pay writers and artists a small fee for their work, both online and in print As for paying ourselves, our naïve dreams of wealth and fame soon proved illusory – and there’s always the spiritual reward to be reaped in solving ‘technical, mechanical issues … in a small room, surrounded by paper’ (The White Review No 3), with the art director Ray   Our fourth editorial was probably our most rousing (‘We hope that you find something in this issue to provoke or inspire you to pick up a pen, a paintbrush, or a placard’), and most embarrassing (‘The future is there to be forged’!) considering that you are likely to land on a picture of Juergen Teller’s scrotum on opening the issue While that photograph may have been an attempt to combat the notion that ‘literary and arts reviews are in London considered decidedly unsexy’ (The White Review No 5), no ‘wild parties ensu[ed] thereof’, despite the editors’ best efforts   By December 2012 our editorials had run out of steam, which perhaps explains why our call for trustees to join our charitable board was ignored Despite stating that ‘any reaction is a gratifying one’, we received none Aggressively pursuing new board members is clearly not our forte, but we like to think that ‘forcefully demonstrating the vitality of literary culture in Britain and Ireland’ is At the time of writing, the editorial staff are working through several piles of submissions to the second White Review Short Story Prize, the tottering heights of which are testament to a thriving writing culture on

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


READ NEXT

fiction

November 2011

Sheepskin

Olivia Heal

fiction

November 2011

The first I noticed was your thumbnails, large, round and flat, like two plates. They were marked with yellowed...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

feature

November 2011

Nude in your hot tub...

Lars Iyer

feature

November 2011

I. Down from the Mountain   Once upon a time, writers were like gods, and lived in the mountains....

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required