Alex Shuttleworth

Each year, the Mays is released as a compendium of student writing from Oxford and Cambridge, showcasing young talent in poetry, fiction and visual arts. The anthology’s most well-known alumna is Zadie Smith, oft-repeated in the Mays promotional material, and the idea behind the collection is to help propel the careers of these writers to similar heights. Here, culture editors Emily and Shefali consider the Mays as this year’s editorship pushes an Oxbridge institution into new, unchartered and interesting waters.

This year represents a break from past editions: instead of separating pieces into distinct sections of poetry, prose and visual arts, editor Emily Fitzell and her team have woven all the works together in a structure that does not restrict the pieces to their traditional categories, but instead encourages readers to make their own connections between works and find their own path through the collection.

Anthologies can be dusty places. This is the proclamation which begins Fitzell’s editorial of the Mays, and which explains why it is shaped so unconventionally, to revitalise the medium. If there is a question of whether editorship in itself constitutes the creation of an art form, then the Mays twenty-three tackles this question unflinchingly. In its entirety, it represents a headstrong attempt to baffle the legacy of anthologies, favouring works which ‘deal hard and straight with the reader’ yet acknowledging that they may be ‘fraying around the edges’. Perhaps the Mays twenty-three in its final form is an anthology of works curated on criteria of unconventionality rather than quality. Certainly a flick through or skim-read might make you believe that. Even the editorials are aesthetically unconventional.

But the unconventionality of many of the pieces is by no means a replacement for quality. The Mays twenty-three is brave; it is constructed from pieces which are good but proudly divergent from what we are accustomed to. In this sense it is not just avoiding complacent work: it challenges complacent readers to put down their preconceptions and expectations and to stand to attention.

There is another question, however, which remains the elephant in the room : is the Mays accessible? Leafing through the pages in Heffers, where short stories written in Scots dialect sit in silent proximity to Dante-inspired sonnets, you might feel like it’s not for you. Perhaps its placement in the bookshop alongside the John Greens and Lee Childs is a ruse, and you are not in fact qualified to read it. You need to have been to that arty party, spoken to that professor in a dimly-lit cafe about the relevance of postructuralism on a gloomy Tuesday afternoon in order to be truly worthy of appreciating the work inside. In a world in which access to culture can still be so limited, and literature and especially poetry so opaque, is this desirable? Does bringing the work of student creatives to a wider audience really only mean the limited one of an existing cultural bubble?

This reading may not be entirely fair. Yes, the Mays is a collection that takes itself seriously, pitches itself hard and aims far. It is far from an exercise in populism or an appeal to the masses, although there are more light-hearted works, like a particularly funny piece by Emma Levin about two bemused young advertising execs. The Mays’ priority seems not to be to open up Cambridge literature to the world, but to launch the careers of these young writers onto a high platform of notoriety. The varied collection of pieces is perhaps a reflection of where these different writers may end up, whether in a more academic or literary context. And you do really get the sense that they will end up places. There is a real sense of excitement in perusing the collection, in which ambition and talent are given the space to flourish.

Quentin Blake, one of the guest editors alongside Alison Turnbull, notes that there is a tendency to move away from introspection: “we are presented with something acted out”. Perhaps it is introspection that we might typically, or even stereotypically, expect from a collection of student writing. And the lack of it seems to lend the collection a cold, detached feel. Such a tone is set by the opening quotation from Simon Critchley; ending with the words “We need to welcome the void, embrace the void”; this inevitably provokes some uneasiness. Fitzell says the Critchley quote serves to introduce the idea of the book as a productive blank canvas; indeed, the anthology seems more concerned with an inherent meaninglessness itself than finding anything redeeming out of it. This appears to suggest that the anthology is more a serious exploration of artistic theme and concept than a work driven by humanity and feeling. However, there is a lot to be said for a structure without this kind of agenda or unifying theme, as the works contained within the collection exist in their own right, not as parts of a broader message imposed upon them.

It also does not mean that the collection is without emotive force. Two pieces in particular stand out in this respect - Kinaesthesia I & III, and Helen Is Other People. Both of these are not introspective, they do not expound and elaborate. But their emotiveness is delicate, simply a shadow of the action, and that is why they are moving.

What is clearest about the Mays is the amount of time and thought that has gone into producing it. The work has truly been written and edited by people who care about promoting good art and providing a platform for good artists. Fitzell is keen to stress that many fantastic works did not make it into the collection, and that all those who applied should look out for this year’s mentoring scheme, being set up with the purpose of supporting promising talent. The Mays twenty-three was not looking to fill its pages with works that are comfortable to approach. It’s an engaging, sometimes disconcerting, rollicking experience. But it is also creatively liberating, because reading this anthology makes it impossible not to see that there are no limits to what art can be.

THE MAYS TWENTY THREE is currently available from select bookshops in Cambridge, Oxford and London, as well as The Mays online shop:
http://mays.varsity.co.uk/purchase/