Claire-Louise Bennett & Ben Pester: Magic & Mechanics
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What is Magic & Mechanics and who are the guests introducing it?
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Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the London Review Bookshop, where tonight we're delighted to be celebrating Magic and Mechanics, just published by Scratch Books. On the panel tonight, we have two of its contributors, Claire Louise Bennett and Ben Pester, and the book's publisher, Tom Conaghan, who will tell you a lot more about it. Join me in giving a very warm welcome to our guests.
Good evening, everyone. Hi there. Yeah, my name is Tom Conaghan. I'm the publisher of Scratch Books, and I'm very excited to be joined by Claire Louise Bennett, who is in the book, and Ben Pester, who isn't in the book yet, but I hope to get him in a book very soon, although he was in duets. Let me tell you a little bit more about them. Claire Louise Bennett's debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Checkout 19 was part of the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2022. Big Kiss, Bye Bye came out last year, and I'm sure there's some fantastic stuff about it, but I don't have anything, sorry. It's fantastic. Ben Pesto is the writer of long and short-form fiction. His debut novel, The Expansion Project, was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for debut fiction and the Goldsmith's Prize.
His story collection, Am I in the Right Place?, was longlisted for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize. His next collection of short stories, Sail Away Land, is coming in June 2026. Yep. Excellent. So that's these guys. Brilliant. We're here to talk about the book, sort of Magic and Mechanics, which came out very recently. And I guess I suppose the first question I wanted to put to the authors was, we call it Magic and Mechanics in the sense that is there like kind of a process of inspiration, a magic, and is there then a kind of a thumping the crap out of it to put it on the page as to a mechanical phase? Claire Louise Bennett, Magic and Mechanics, is that a decent way of describing writing?
Is it? Well, it's quite nice. And it's a very nice title for a book.
Oh, thank you. Yeah, you said that. That was a relief. Yeah. Is it a useful way of thinking about it, though? Is it that stage?
Is it that way around? No, not really.
No. What's it like?
What's what, like writing? You know, writing. Maybe they're intertwined a bit more or something like that. I think, well, you know, I can only speak for myself. I guess, I don't know whether I'd call it magic, but there's something that sort of happens as I write. So it's not like I have sort of an inspiration particularly sort of, you know, prior to it and I think, oh, I've got to, you know, write this down or what have you. I sort of write without anything in particular just because I like how writing feels. So the reason for me writing is just to be writing. Because, like I said, I've always quite enjoyed how it feels, you know, the sort of just doing it. It makes me feel like I'm, well, doing something.
And I don't, there's not many things I like doing. for very long periods of time, but I can write for long periods of time. So that makes me feel like I'm sort of doing something kind of vaguely worthwhile, which is a nice sort of feeling to have, because a lot of the time I'm not very usefully employed. So that's really what's going on there. And then ideally then when I am writing, what feels even better is then when, you know, it's sort of this, there's a sense of some energy kind of happening. I'm not sure why that sort of happens or when, but I can write for a long time and it's just like kind of not plodding along, but I'm just sort of writing. And then sometimes there's just this sort of little kind of a crawl of some sort of energy.
And I think, oh, all right. And yeah, that's about it.
Do you do anything with that energy? Is there another phase? Or is that you just sort of chop it and that's good to go?
Well, I sort of try not to sort of fudge it by thinking about it too much or getting too excited or letting it know that I know that it's happening.
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