In bed with K Patrick

Oscar Wilde was *not* carrying a copy of The Yellow Book

Hullo,

Solid ground is overrated. It’s no fun. Why must we always stump around on it, walking, urgh, dragging our feet – like so many dull beasts of the field – over mile upon mile of grass, tarmac, dirt, chalk, loam, rock (igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic), etc?

Mightn’t we instead choose to float, swanlike and serene, above the liquid element?

If you have asked yourself these questions – and admit it, you have – some good news. This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the concept of boats.

Marvellous things, boats.

Look, here’s one:

A boat. Or rather, a ship.

This is a very special boat. Or rather, a ship.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘Ships are very fine, in their way, but they haven’t the amenities of the land. I’m used to civilisation, you know, and all its essentials. Such as, for instance, The Pub.’

But this ship has a pub. It looks like this.

A pub. On a ship.

‘Aha!’ you retort. ‘But what about culture? I can’t just drink grog all night. Where is the grog of the mind? To whit, the arts. What of… theatre?’

But this ship has a theatre. It looks like this.

The owners of the ship are so proud of their theatre, in fact, that they chose to christen the vessel Theatreship.

And on Tuesday July 8, at 7pm (doors 6.30), we will be launching the first issue of The Little Review in that very theatre, bobbing merrily in the water, just a few minutes’ stroll from Canary Wharf overground station, in London’s naughty docklands.

The gig will feature performances from many of our contributors – Timothy Donnelly, Holly Hopkins and Alex Wong among them – and many a drink in the floating pub.

Come join us. Tickets are a snip at £5, and include a free copy of Issue 1.

To reserve your ticket, just click on this shiny button.

And now, some highlights from that same issue.

The Little Interview

K Patrick was one of 20 writers on Granta’s once-a-decade list, The Best of Young British Novelists, in 2023. Born and living in Scotland, Patrick is the author of the novel Mrs S (2023), which follows a young, Australian butch matron at a boarding school who is drawn into an affair with the headmaster’s wife, and the poetry collection Three Births (2024). A second novel, Sid, is supposedly forthcoming in February 2026, unless Patrick misses the publisher’s deadline, which judging from the following conversation is a distinct possibility.

Patrick has a buzz-cut, a friendly manner, and an unsettling habit of redirecting questions back at the interviewer. Parts of this interview have been edited for brevity, edited out of a sense of mischief, or omitted because the dictaphone stopped working and I was enjoying the conversation too much to notice. (There was a great bit about the sensuality of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Alas, you’ll never read it.)

K Patrick: ‘Poetry is humiliating’

I’ve heard you write in bed.

All the time. I was doing it until about an hour and a half ago.

How does that help?

In bed, the stakes are extremely low. If I was to get up and put a different outfit on and sit at a desk, I’d freak out. I’d think this is too serious. Writing in bed works for me because it means I’m able to get some privacy back, for me and my pleasure, to make writing more of a selfish act, to ask: is this entertaining me, is this meaningful to me?

As long as the lighting is low and I’ve got my duvet and pillows and my pyjamas – or sometimes not even pyjamas – it feels like it’s easier. I’ll have my notebooks with me, like 10 books spread out across the bed.

I do have a desk, I just hardly ever sit at it. Sometimes for editing. But even then, sometimes I like to do it when I’m sleepy – there’s just something about that state. I’ll start working between 5am and 7am. Those are my favourite times to work, it’s a detached time, the squishy part of the day. It’s the best time of day because it’s not real yet, the world isn’t a particular place yet between five and seven… later on, I can’t write because the day’s too real – I have to put washing on, or do something important.

Do you ever fall back to sleep while writing?

No, writing really wires me. I can’t even read before bed because I get overexcited… If I want to get a good night’s sleep I’ve got to go to bed at eight. It’s difficult to maintain a social life if you go to bed early.

Well, writing in bed worked for Proust. And I believe that fora long time he went to bed early.

But how early? Some of my friends go to bed at 11 and are like ‘what an early night!’ but I’ve been asleep for three hours by then.

How’s your second novel coming along?

Slowly. Everyone warned me second novels are extremely difficult. They were right.

What’s it about?

It’s about more gays! [Laughs] I don’t really know what it’s about. In fact, I wrote that in my notebook today: what is this about? I want to return to the themes I’ve been working over, like masculinity, this idea of a queer rural, or what it means to be queer in rural areas, and the body. But what it’s about remains to be seen.

OK. Where is it set?

It’s set in Scotland. There’s a specific place, but I’m still deciding on whether or not to use the placename… There are all these huge decisions that I have to make in the next couple of months because I’m nearing the deadline.

When’s your publisher’s deadline?

In seven weeks.

Oh dear. Have you figured out the plot yet?

It has a plot this time! Mrs S got accused of being plotless, which I think was mean, because there was definitely a plot in it. But in this one I’m trying to do Big Plot, so we’ll see how that turns out.

It’s fun, it just isn’t always how I usually think – I don’t enter into a project with an idea of beginning, middle and end.

In the new issue of a much larger magazine, The Erotic Review, you write: ‘The body is too good for the poem.’

Yes, I did write that. What does it mean? Nine times out of 10 in my work I’m writing into this failure of language... The body is too good for the poem. Especially the queer body, the trans body.

Why especially?

Because you’re on the outside of language – in a good way, though obviously it’s used against the trans body in a lot of ways. The way language operates currently doesn’t quite cover the trans body in the way it should, or the available terminology isn’t there. Language can feel like an attempt to clarify, but when it comes to transness I feel like I want to mystify, or re-mystify, or keep it mysterious somehow.

Writing about sex is famously difficult. Maybe sex is when we’re most aware of our bodies, and furthest from language.

I think that’s fair. I also think language is prone to ruining those things really easily. When you actually put words on the page it has this awful sense of permanence, whereas sex is the opposite of that… Sex writing is a real test of an author’s ability.

The PR person plugging The Erotic Review who suggested that we do this interview (and who was probably hoping it would appear somewhere with more readers) referred to your new bit of writing for that magazine as ‘a piece’ in their first few emails, then finally broke down and called it a poem.

Yeah, it’s poetry – I love prose poetry.

As someone who writes short fiction, how clear in your mind is the divide between a prose poem and a short story?

Really clear, actually. Though I don’t really think in wholes – with a W, not just an H, because I do obviously think in holes with just an H! [Laughs] You can’t really talk about this stuff without sounding pretentious.

Please try.

I tend to start with a first image, and the image will tell me what form it belongs in. The line that comes out of that will tell me it’s going to work itself out as a prose poem, or as a short story. I’ve never got it wrong, so far. I don’t think I’ve ever started in one form and had to switch to another.

It’s funny, when I was asked to write that new poem, I struggled. I found it really hard to get back into poetry. It’s the hardest of all the tasks, it’s really hard to get into that headspace. It takes so much more confidence, it’s so much more humiliating.

Why is poetry humiliating?

I think if you asked any poet they would say the same thing. All writing is innately embarrassing, but there’s something especially humiliating about the poem. It’s the more daring act, it comes with a lot of different baggage, and it can be so bad so easily…

Poetry has different ways of being intimate. Addressing the reader, for instance, and drawing attention to the page, like you do in the first poem of Three Births – you go from describing a photo to addressing the reader, before you say ‘pleasure will continue to fold us up (we are only pieces of paper)’.

To implicate the reader, or have the reader second-guessing their implication in the poem, I think that’s kinda hot. Innately hot, right? It’s in a context where that ‘you’ can be toyed with in a way that I find interesting. It’s partly because of the nature of my work. The title of that poem is ‘Pick-up Truck Sex’, so you know what you’re starting with. My poems have terrible titles – they just say what they are!

The Guardian’s reviewer called your novel Mrs S ‘essentially a lengthy prose poem’. Is that a compliment or an insult?

I can’t tell. Sometimes it’s both. If it’s The Guardian, I think it’s both. The response to Mrs S is so polarised – some people can’t stand it, they find that way of reading really exhausting. I thought it was a totally normal book… I thought that it wasn’t weird enough. I just thought of it as a novel, then people started pointing out things [such as the novel’s lack of speech marks] and calling it a prose poem…

Maybe it’s to do with labels. If it’s labelled an ‘experimental novel’ some people might think it’s too normal, but it might annoy a different set of people for the opposite reason if they find it in, say, the ‘Romance and Erotica’ section of WH Smith.

It does on Goodreads. People on Goodreads were very bothered! [laughs] It throws people off. It’s a bit funny for me to have it categorised as romance – I’ve been in a few events or panels where I’ve had to answer to this idea of romance as a genre.

Who writes well about sex and bodies?

A lot of Robert Glück’s work does that fantastically, for example in his novel Margery Kempe. Harry Josephine Giles’s Them! is so great. And I’ve been re-reading TS Eliot’s Four Qu-. TFS

Poem of the week:

Poetry of the ’Nineties

Henry Newbolt led the cheers for God
and England. Rudyard Kipling’s ballads crash-
bang-walloped like a brass band. WE Henley
saw the future in a novel-reading barmaid.
Alice Meynell chose Rome. Lord Alfred Douglas
was famous for other things. Lionel Johnson
drank. John Todhunter struck the Celtic note.
Theodore Wratislaw cultivated hothouse flowers.
Richard Le Gallienne called streetlights ‘lamps of sin’.
Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper
were Michael Field. Francis Thompson followed
De Quincey into opium and squalor. John Barlas
took a blow to the head and died confined.
Ah socialism, but also sweet spring blossom,
Dollie Radford told Marx. The absent
Amy Levy’s omnibus terminated
in 1889. Alfred Austin [muffled laughter].
Pound would sweep up Victor Plarr for Mauberley.
When Yeats met Verlaine, they communicated
in a form of dumbshow. The ballads AE
Housman struck up after a glass of ale
had a faintly murderous edge. Oscar Wilde
was not carrying a copy of The Yellow
Book when arrested at the Cadogan Hotel.
Ernest Dowson coined the word ‘soccer’.
Amid the swirling ectoplasm at the séance
Olive Custance felt a ghostly hand on her thigh.
Versified by Yeats, Walter Pater
entertained dreams of vague Greek boys
while his sisters fried his sausages. What
the bloody hell do you want, asked Swinburne
naked, answering the door to George Moore.
Growing overstimulated, Arthur
Symons collapsed and survived himself
by decades. As John Davidson’s body
washed out of Penzance the far lights
of Scotland would have lain hard to starboard. DW