High spirits

High Spirits: A round of drinking stories is a short story anthology revolving around drinking, drunkenness and featuring alcohol more generally. Last weekend it won the 2019 Saboteur Awards for Best Anthology, and for good reason.

Each story connects the ways that we interact with alcohol with the cultural triggers for its enjoyment or abuse. Although it’s not as simple as that. The stories present the way that drinking bares some truths that are repressed by the daily pressures of society.

Here’s a snippet from Painting The Walls White by Michael Stewart

There are themes of forgetting up and down, falling, losing ones way — whether that’s from the grind of trying to paint vast expanses of white walls white again, or in the belief you have found some new and romantic catacombs in the Paris sewers. The first exposes the rawness of work on our lives, the friction it creates and the demands it makes on us all mentally — which can lead to creating habitual coping mechanisms. It reflects the easy acceptance of the cultural norm of alcohol as a cure for low level trauma — make yourself weak through work and make yourself numb through drink. Equally, in the depths of the sewers, a longer term relationships with drinking is exposed where a the dedication to wish thinking, to better dreams.

Elsewhere drink is somewhat celebrated, such as in In Vino, Vanitas by Janes Roberts, where our wine taster becomes one with the descriptions of the taste of the wine. Like other stories the chaining body through drink is a theme — shrunken brains, painful hydration, drying out, aching everything. With all of it, even with the idea of becoming the vine being a fabulous idea, each story contains some act of submission to drink and relinquishing the self. Even in the more triumphant stories of overcoming past defeats, it is the drink that creates a release for viciousness in the moment. Exploring the relationship between these characters can uncomfortably reveal how drink infiltrates our culture — and how we all support it.

Pick up High Spirits from Valley Press

This week’s song is James Blake — Take a Fall for Me ft. RZA

Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It’s late because I was at the pub with the dearest of friends. It should be noted that High Spirits beat the the collection I helped edit — May We Borrow Your Country for the award, and also that Hannah Stevens, ETTO regular, is one of the contributors. I got some really nice emails last week, which I would like to encourage more of.