Manchester bombing: the use and abuse of personal testimony?

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The power of personal testimony was every where yesterday.

Radio 4 is effectively audio wallpaper in our house but throughout the day the voices of those who had been at the Ariana Grande concert or picking up their kids from it stopped me in my tracks.

Emotion surged through my body like an energy with no outlet for expression other than to prickle into a few hot tears.

Conflicted

But as is often the way with these kind of terrible events I felt hugely conflicted about the era of 24 hour news that we live in. Even the journalist on the radio sounded shell shocked yesterday morning as he said, ‘it’s hard to believe that this terrible event took place less than ten and a half hours ago.’

And here’s the thing. If it’s hard to believe for the journalists, if it’s hard to bear for those of us listening to the radio, watching the news, scrolling our twitter feeds, how much harder must it be for the people involved, the children, teenagers and families?

Is it therefore okay that almost as soon as it had happened reporters at the scene were interviewing the victims as they emerged from the arena?

Is it okay that adults and children who most definitely have not had time to process the experience are interviewed, albeit by sympathetic reporters?

News agenda

During our Journalism Masters programme at UWE we used to have weekly ‘news days’. We operated like any newsroom in the country, we came in with story ideas, the editorial meeting was held, decisions made about the days news agenda and we were each assigned roles.

On one of these occasions, two of our class were sent out to get footage for a story about a mugging that had taken place. They were encouraged to find the address of the elderly lady who had been attacked, go to her home and ‘doorstep’ her for an interview. As I remember it was known that she had said she was not interested in talking to the media, hence we couldn’t phone ahead to set up an interview.

Being good students the girls set off to do as they were told. And being good would-be journalists they got the footage. But none of us felt okay about it and over the next few days we raised our concerns (via our Media, law and ethics tutor) about the rightness of this action.

During the group meeting that was held at the end of our next news day we were encouraged to talk about how we felt. Our course tutors were both former journalists and editors who had worked for the BBC and ITV.

As good journalists they listened well. As good journalists they gently explained, ‘this is the job, whether you like it or not.’ As good human beings they shared the rationale that they had internalised over the years, no doubt as part of their own coping mechanisms. ‘The thing is,’ they explained, ‘it’s actually really helpful for people to talk, for people to tell their stories. It helps them heal.’

Storytelling as healing

I’m big on storytelling, I’m big on storytelling as part of the healing process. After the death of my dad and then years later after the death of my mum I know from personal experience that strange, pressing need to keep retelling the story. I know too how hard it can be to feel okay about the need to retell the story.

I also know that in the days immediately following the death of my father my journal falls strangely silent on the subject. There are no words to begin with.

I’m no expert on trauma and grief but I believe when those first words come out the kind of environment they emerge into is incredibly important.

Now the BBC and other news agencies may well have support teams in place to help the people they have interviewed afterwards, and I understand that Manchester as a city is doing its utmost to provide the survivors with all the help and support they possibly can.

So hopefully these children, teenagers, mums, dads, friends and family will have all the comfort and aid they need to help them in these first few days of staggering unreality.

My even bigger hope is that support remains in place in the weeks, months and years to come, long after the news agenda has moved on and the media machine has forgotten those voices. I really hope those people have someone to turn to then, someone who is still willing to listen to their story and to do so without any agenda beyond respect, care and love for the people who are talking to them.

Manchester, Ariana Grande, Manchester bombing, concert, grief, trauma, interview, #ManchesterBombing

Comics, Kickstarter and Unfinished City: An interview with novelist Ben Dickson

As a kid I read any number of comics from the Beano to Misty.  No preparation for a holiday in Cornwall was complete without the pre-requisite trip to the newsagent to stock up on comic books and magazines – doubtless a desperate parental attempt at keeping things quiet and peaceful between my sister and me for the eight-hour (traffic-gods willing...) journey down to the West Country.

Last week I found myself chatting to Bristol based graphic novelist Benjamin Dickson (@beniswriting) about his latest project, Unfinished City.  The conversation has decidedly rekindled my interest in the comic medium, not least because of his decision to fund the completion of the novel through Kickstarter.

Unfinished City is a crime drama set in former Yugoslavia co-written with Sylvjia Martinovic.  Dickson and Martinovic met whilst working at Studio Upstairs in 2007.

“We were both already writers and after a couple of weeks of getting to know each other we thought ‘Shall we do something together?’  Sylvjia said ‘Let’s do a crime drama’.  She had lived in Montenegro, in a town that, rightly or wrongly, has a reputation for crime.  I was up for it because the Eastern European setting was exciting and had an exotic edge.”

After two years of working on drafts and a further two years searching to find exactly ‘the right’ artist for the book Dickson and Martinovic teamed up with Croatian illustrator Robert Solanovic.

“We both really wanted an artist from the Balkans because they would be able to give a level of visual reality to the project that other artists couldn’t – they would know what plug sockets and street signs should look like.”

Despite commercial success (Dickson has already published four graphic novels and has a fifth coming out later this year - Santa Claus vs the Nazis) the team wanted to ensure they maintained autonomy in the production of this particular book.

Dickson says: “Unfinished City is unusual because it is a crime drama, told from a female point of view, in Eastern Europe, as a graphic novel.  To the best of my knowledge, that’s never been done before.”

Dickson has been interested in exploring the Kickstarter funding model and decided this could be an interesting route for Unfinished City.

Kickstarter, for the uninitiated, is a crowdfunding platform that enables you to set a financial target that you reach through investment from people on the net who are interested in seeing your project happen.  If the goal is reached within the time set then investors will receive a copy of the item – with larger backers receiving more ornate, specialised and bespoke copies.  If the goal is not met, investments are returned and, very sadly, the project isn’t funded.

For Unfinished City the Kickstarter funding will pay for the illustration of the book and pay for hardback and paperback copies that the backers will receive.

“Kickstarter is simply a means of completing the book and getting it out there to a first audience.  Once we’re there hopefully we can do more fun things with it.”

Dickinson says: “I won’t personally see a penny of the funding!  I’ll only make money of it if we exceed the goal and/or hopefully get a foreign language edition developed – this is very much a labour of love for me!”

It will take nearly a year to produce the whole book, however it has been written as a trilogy and will be released in three 48-page instalments (as per the French ‘Bande dessinee’ model).  Dickson and the team anticipate sending out PDFs of the book to backers every time an instalment is completed which they expect will be every four months.

Despite the drop off in comic sales and interest in the nineties Dickson feels there’s been a real resurgence in interest in the past 10 – 15 years. Dickson believe we’re now living in a second golden age of comics – but this is happening in bookshops and comic shops rather than on the newsstands as it did previously.

Historically the US and UK market have been pretty different – the US literally have the market on Superheroes.  Dickson explains that UK comics have tended to be more Action-Adventure for boys and drama and romance for girls but that what is happening now in UK comic development is pushing the boundaries of the medium even further.  Whilst you still won’t find many British superheroes, Action-Adventure is joined by more arty and socio-political work in comics today.

Reading the free 20-page sample of Unfinished City there is something decidedly European about this story which promises to progress into an increasingly challenging and tough crime drama.  Dickson warns readers not to be too quick to judge the fact that hero Nadja Djurkovic is a girl.

“It makes it a far more interesting story actually.  The fact she’s a she changes they dynamics but that’s not exactly a bad thing. There’s a particular moment at the end of the first part when I asked Sylvjia what she thought would’ve happened at that particular moment if Nadja had been a man.  She said, ‘They definitely would’ve killed him’. It’s a simple as that.”

Dark indeed...