We were delighted to welcome David Cramer Smith to Chatham Library on 2 March as our first 'AuthorsTalking' event.
David is a writer who grew up in Medway, but moved to Australia a few years ago. We were lucky that he was back in the UK for a short visit, when he came to talk about his debut novel 'Medway'. Because with a title like that, we had to ask him to come and talk about it!
'Medway: a dysfunctional family of several knackered old towns situated two hundred miles south east of Manchester'
What a great start to Medway River Lit! Wordsmithery first encountered David some years ago when we published him the first ever issue of our magazine Confluence with a story called 'Classmates' parents' cars'. This was his first published piece. David read this story to the audience and said that being published in Confluence had actually given him the confidence to take his writing more seriously.
David then went on to speak engagingly and authentically about how autobiographical, or not, 'Medway' is.
The book is described like this on the publisher's website;
"Jamie Sinclair is a bipolar ex-chav, an impostor knocking at the door of the middle class. On a whim he decides to leave his toxic relationship and move back to his parents’ house, to see if his hometown can fix him. But three questions need to be answered:
Can he be fixed? Can a place fix someone? And what does it mean to be fixed?"
Medway deals with issues of mental health and addiction, and has been praised for its honest portrayal of living with bipolar.
It was great to hear what David had to say about the book and writing and we're sad that we only had a couple of hours to talk about it! He is currently working on a second book, and we wish him the best with it and we'd love to read it when it's done!
The book can be borrowed from Medway Libraries, bought from all the usual online retailers, and downloaded as an e-book from Google books.