Local Fires

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2024. SHORTLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK AWARD 2024. Local Fires sees debut writer Joshua Jones turn his acute focus to his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales. Sardonic and melancholic, joyful and grieving, these multifaceted stories may be set in a small town, but they have reach far beyond their locality. From the inertia of living in an ex-industrial working-class area, to gender, sexuality, toxic masculinity and neurodivergence, Jones has crafted a collection versatile in theme and observation, as the misadventures of the town's inhabitants threaten to spill over into an incendiary finale. Jones runs the Cardiff-based neurodivergent, queer-led community library and art/lit space, Dyddiau Du -- Publisher: Parthian Books
Parthian has established a good track record for amplifying queer voices from Wales. In recent years it has brought back into print a selection of John Sam Jones short stories, along with his memoir, The Journey is Home; and the memoir of gay rights hero Jeffrey Weeks, A Queer Boy from Wales, also found its home at Parthian. Perhaps most significantly it published the near definitive tome, Queer Square Mile: a collection of queer short stories from Wales compiling content from 1837 through to 2018. With Joshua Jones, the Welsh publisher is bringing its track record right into the present. Jones is a leading figure in the modern queer literary scene in Wales. He was a co-founder of Cardiff’s Dyddiau Du, a ‘NeuroQueer art and literature space’. He was also a Literature Wales Emerging Writer for 2023 and has been working with the British Council to connect queer writers from Wales and Vietnam. So it’s no surprise to see Jones’s debut story collection, Local Fires, coming out with Parthian. Jones is a young and exciting contemporary writer who writes from experience, setting his stories in Llanelli, his hometown. What emerges throughout the collection is a picture of small-town life that is vivid and relatable to anyone who grew up in similar-sized locations. The claustrophobic reality of life ‘where everybody knows your name’ is a little less Cheers, and more the Half Moon, the pub in which Jones sets the excellent ‘Half Moon, New Year’. While all the stories in this collection stand alone, there are links and recurring characters. ‘Half Moon, New Year’ is the third story, for example, to reference Danny Jenkins, a young man who wanders through the collection like a two-dimensional cock-of-the-walk, seemingly admired by all. As Jenkins is described throughout 'Half Moon, New Year’ and fleshed out, it becomes clear that his attractiveness and status very much come from the fear he elicits in others, with his own fears and insecurities manifesting in a violence that is never far from the surface. Where Jones excels is in taking a thuggish character like Danny Jenkins and painting his fury and violence with a sympathy that is unexpected. Jones has a talent for this kind of unexpected subtlety. While his depiction of the brutish Danny Jenkins is sympathetic, highlighting the nuance in his character, Jones similarly brings this subtle multiplicity into other characters and situations. In ‘Fourth Wedding’, Angie can also initially be read as a small-town archetype: a slightly sad and aging figure, gradually finding peace living with the consequences of her own life choices and reluctant acceptance of her own perceived limitations in life. However, queer love and high art make incidental appearances in her life and subtly hint at a complexity of reality that’s not initially apparent. Reference to Rodin’s The Age of Bronze sits alongside hangovers, cheap white wine and a string of failed relationships. Similarly, heterosexual love sits alongside parental love and queer acceptance. There is no segregation between supposed ‘high’, ‘low’ or queer cultures, and this is as refreshing as it is important to read. Queerness and diversity are recurring themes in Jones’s stories. They are, however, just themes and not dominating or sole issues. ‘Under the Belt, Above the Bed’ is a prime example of what makes this an exciting and forward-looking collection. Depicting a date between a trans character and a drag queen, with conversation focused on queer life in a small town, it would be all too easy for a lesser writer to fall into the trap of writing fiction as a thinly veiled on-the-nose think piece. Jones, however, creates two fully formed characters and avoids these pitfalls, and his reality is far more nuanced and complex for it. In Jones’s Llanelli there are no stereotypical closeted figures, and the tired tropes of ‘small-town’ equating to ‘small minds’ are absent. Instead, modern queer life in Llanelli is asking questions like, ‘How can I be trans and queer in a place like this? There’s nowhere to dance!’ ‘It’s Black Country Out There’ is a highlight of Local Fires. A series of random and ever-growing black holes offers a lightly surreal murky metaphor for, well, something. Wales’s mining history? Welsh tragedies? Depression? It perfectly establishes the world in which Jones has grown up. On a similar theme, the recurring set of ‘Brief Interview with Condemned Child’ (numbers 1, 2, and 3) offers brief depictions of the realities of life for those growing up with minimal resources or community assets around them. Local Fires is an important, exciting, and contemporary read. It is camp and it is fun, with references to queer joy, drag culture, Ru Paul, Kim Woodburn and the escapism offered by pop culture sitting alongside the realities of life in small-town Wales. Jones presents both the grit and the pearl of modern queer life and reinforces Parthian as a publisher to follow for modern and diverse Welsh voices. -- Liam Nolan @ www.gwales.com