One evening a few months later, just as my fiancé Emma and I were getting into bed, I’d grabbed my phone to check my email. I hoped that through them I’d find a sympathetic audience, but was aware that this act was still a wild punt into the darkness. I never doubted my subject matter though, and so I finished the manuscript then submitted it to the Northern Writers’ Awards, organised by New Writing North to provide opportunities for writers based in the north of England. But publishing one essay about a nowhere town is a very different matter to publishing a whole book of them. When one of my Withernsea essays was included in Test Signal, an anthology of new northern writing published by Dead Ink Books and Bloomsbury, I felt a glimmer of hope that a publisher might find my manuscript intriguing. My stories were about burlesque-dancing pensioners, identity struggles, and interdimensional werewolves, which made for a tougher sell. This doubt was fed by my suspicion that the publishing world found northern stories unpalatable unless they featured characters with smutted faces who doggedly operated looms. This is an area that few people seem to know or care about, so my concern was that, while I thought my stories were worth telling, I wasn’t sure that anyone else would agree. My book, Cold Fish Soup, is a collection of ten interconnected personal essays about my family and my experiences in and around the town of Withernsea, located on East Yorkshire’s Holderness coast.

This was in part because I was committing the sin of writing a memoir while being neither famous nor infamous, but also because the story I was writing was a peculiarly northern one. During the writing of my memoir, the question I most often asked myself was “how dare I?” This was closely followed by “why should anyone care?” Despite the frequency with which I asked these questions, I always struggled to come up with decent answers.

Life in a Nowhere Town by Hanna Dare