Jeff Young - Ghost Town

 I have with good fortune just rediscovered Jeff Young, Jeff is a writer for radio, television, stage and screen. He is one of BBC Radio Drama's most acclaimed dramatists, having written over twenty broadcast plays. For television, he has written for Casualty, Doctors, Eastenders, and Holby City. He has worked on many arts projects in Liverpool, including with Bill Drummond. He is also a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the Screen School of Liverpool John Moores University.

I came across Jeff about 12 months ago whilst researching writing styles through his broadcasts on BBC Radio 3's podcast The Essay My journal entry highlighted the similarity between some of the experiences of Liverpool that Jeff writes about and my own. I was delighted to discover that when I revisited Jeff on the internet in respect of the Creative Writing course that I have just started, mainly because I am proposing to write a memoir, I was delighted to discover that Jeff had not only published a new book Ghost Town but that he was a Costa Award nominee. 

I downloaded a sample from Kindle and was immediately blown away by Jeff's writing, both content and style. From his opening words, I felt as though I had just started reading my own Memoir. I downloaded the full book and also the Audible audiobook version. I was not disappointed, whilst the book was magic to read the audio so beautifully narrated by David Mossisy, whose soft scouse tones were made for the task, was a delight to listen to. I binged it.

Jeff's style of writing is like no other I have experienced. it is vividly visual, a perfect example of what My Creative Writing tutor had been trying to convey, "Show not Tell" style of writing. This is the first paragraph from Ghost Town...

My mother liked to trespass—she didn't call it 

trespassing, she called it having a nose. We'd 

have a look round the Corn Exchange or go up 

the back stairs of an insurance building, slip 

into the Oriel Chambers and sort of just ... 

breathe. We were breathing in Victorian dust 

and the pipe smoke of Dickensian ledger 

clerks; drinking in shadows and gloom and 

beams of light. We'd stand on fire escapes and 

gaze across the rooftops. I was short- 

trousered and eight years old and I was madly 

in love—with a city. 

Jeff Young 

I was hooked, this is what my Grandma used to do with me, drag me around the numerous magnificent buildings of Liverpool as though she owned them, with no regard for the commissioner on the door or the reception desk, she took me on her own conducted tour, explaining things as we went. Then, Jeff's evocation of moving to the edgelands of north Liverpool again echoed the experience I shared with my best mate Leo when he was moved from Liverpool's Dock Road to the half-built estate of Netherton, our own adventure playground, even more, adventurous than the one he had left behind among the soaring Warehouses and desolate bomb sites of the docklands.

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay - Jeff Young