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Dust Particles is Birmingham based-writer James Kennedy’s latest book, providing many distinctive insights into aspects of modern life as seen from the platform of Birmingham, the UK’s second city. The book is a collection of his creative non-fiction work and poetry from the last five years.
Titles such as The Office is like a Graveyard, 80 is the new 30, 1920’s Brum Cream Brylcreem and Pies and Harry’s Phwoar illustrate the spectrum of humour and pathos that Dust Particles offers its reader. The book ends with the Well Done Pig Trilogy, a darkly humourous piece about the plight of a local village community when a hog roast goes wrong.
James has many primary inspirations. He continuously evolves his view of city life in the context of its history, its multicultural ethos and its people. There is the city, from spectacular new shopping centres and exhibition venues to derelict buildings and broken down parks, from a distinctive Victorian heritage to Indian corner sweetshops. There are the people, from the top deck of the rush hour bus to the urban yuppies in local wine bars. He is also acutely aware of the impact and interplay of the media in its various manifestations - press, TV, radio and the web - and of the impact of trends and development in modern music.
“In a large city, everywhere you turn and anywhere you go there’s something or someone that fires the imagination. But it always strikes me that no matter what people are, or what they do, and no matter what the environment, in the final analysis everything is particles of dust,” says James: “My work tries to illustrate the amazing spectrum of urban life while identifying the common factors that make people essentially the same. The writing is steeped in the imagination, putting the magic into realism.”
The book also features poems which form the basis of the narrative of his abandoned first novel, Pork Pie, about a celebrity chef who travels to schools promoting healthy eating and lifestyles, whilst a shadowy government agency decides to manipulate the chef’s principles for their own diabolical pursuits. The novel has been abandoned for the foreseeable future due to other commitments, but the poems are preserved for the interested.
James is one of the most recognised and active members of Birmingham’s creative writing and performing community. He is a graduate of Birmingham City University, and won its Jim Crace Prize for Creative Writing in 2006, and is due to graduate from the University’s MA course in 2013. His blog, www.jameskennedycentral.wordpress.com features diaries and reviews of other shows, creating many different narratives from the city of Birmingham and beyond.
He was a founder member of the non-profit writers’ collective Wrote Under Publishing. After compiling four self published books; Big Time, Hard On, Anytime and …I Ask You, he collaborated with two other authors and was published in Wrote Under’s first collection, The Underground Three: Three Go Mainstream. He is currently working on his first full-length project, The Wind, a creative non-fiction work about re-imagining the city of Birmingham, using elements of psychogeography, satire and magic realism.
The cover was designed by Birmingham based graphic designer Ryan Killeen, who recently designed the new logo for the Digbeth is Good website.