‘Not  long into a Steve Dearden story, I’m always a bit lost, bewildered almost. I mean in a good way – compelled not confused.  There’s a mystery I have to solve. Part of the mystery is in the meticulous unfolding of the story and the other part is the powerful force and density of his language; dense and then suddenly the language is very spare, oddly abstract, yet I always feel present in the physical event.  Enigmatic. I guess that’s the best word. I’m far away, third person far away, then I’m so close I can smell the breath coming at me off the page.  In a moment, the story can go violent, almost too violent, then sexy, really sexy, then funny. Not just funny, hilarious.  Strangely obsessive.  And very very smart. Wonderful moments of existential clarity. And then he breaks my heart. Bastard.’

TOM SPANBAUER

I’ve been a Writer in Residence at Bluewater Shopping Centre as part of archiTEXTS for the 2013 & 14 Wakefield Literature Festivals.

In addition to the publications in the slider above, my stories have been published in magazines such as Westerly, Horizont and the Reater and anthologies like route’s Compendium and Naked City and Brace from Comma Press.  A rare poem appeared in Red Squirrel Press’s anthology to celebrate the Yorkshire start of the Tour de France. I’ve also used writing as a creative form of evaluation with people like Leeds 365 Stories.

I’ve led prose/short story workshops for festivals and writers groups am a visiting lecturer on the Leeds University Creative Writing MA and a visiting fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Then there are all the writers I help develop in the Writing Squad!

I am always interested in working with new groups, so do get in touch.

Interland was a collaboration with Kath McKay, Adam Strickson and from Yorkshire, England and Carita Nystrom, Marko Hautala and Ralf Andtbacka from Ostrobothnia, Finland.

‘Steve Dearden’s short prose epiphanies are perfectly placed at the beginning of the book. There’s a carefully organised and mellifluous quality that carries you along. There is also a great variety of location: his city centre office, the reservoirs on which he sails, the moors surrounding and draining under his house, the rugby pitch of his school days and the Manchester Ship Canal. Throughout his pieces there is a marriage of detail and resonance that is both beguiling and revealing.’ Ian Pople

Six steps under water – Kuusi askelta veden alla – Sex steg under vattenbeautifully edited by Janet Fisher, is published by Smith Doorstop and includes translations into Finnish and Swedish along with photos, introductions and email exchanges from the collaboration.

Single Skin features nine short stories and is published by Smith Doorstop as an ebook and is available from Amazon for Kindle.

‘The unexpected and the extraordinary presented in a terrific matter of fact way – it startles the reader. Nothing’s redundant but there’s a strange expansion of space inside these stories so that they seem to grow when you’ve read them.’ Patricia Dunker

‘Steve’s stories are populated by real people with real jobs and real desires and real fears; and yet, somewhere in the rhythms of the dialogue and the scaffolding of the terse descriptions, you can find loneliness, and majesty, and a belief in humanity that gives your heart a lift. In these offices and departure lounges and bedrooms and kitchens, lives are made vivid by prose that pins down meaning and ideas without artifice…’  Ian McMillan 

‘I read Single Skin over a family reunion weekend at a rather cheerless Travel Lodge in Southampton which sort of fitted the stories, out of comfort zone, slightly disturbing, making you hold up your own everyday life against it. Not one cliched setting or situation but always a universal truth.’ Jonathan Hall

Wakelost Wakefound was commissioned as part of my residency at the 2013 and 2014 Wakefield Litfests. It allowed me to play with three things I love: writing, taking photographs and messing about with them in Pixelmator.

I have always been fascinated by the way stillness and movement intersect in the patchwork of urban spaces around, what was then, the festival’s beautiful 18th century HQ, The Orangery: a bit of industrial edgeland, a gateway of banks and hotels converted to clubs and bars, a high street of empty shops that local activists were reanimating, an almost collegiate area of Georgian brick, and then the new developments around Burgage Square and Wakefield One. And sitting there side by side, the other worlds of a refugee hostel and the maximum security prison I used to go inside once to place writers in residence!

In the resulting online piece you can follow four characters, Clara, Xoriyo, Lyn and Pete, through 24 Wakefield hours.

The LS6 story began many years ago when my Spanish was very poor, I read in El Pais about a Spanish book set in Leeds. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it (perhaps because I thought it was a book of poetry).  Then I met the author, Mario Crespo, at the Festival de Premier Roman in Chambéry and bought the book, LS6, which I gave to my friend and Writing Squad grad Sally Ashton, knowing she was on the look out things that would expand her successful career as a technical translator into something more literary.

She went for it, but suggested we do it together.  My Spanish was slightly better by then, but I am not a translator.  We translated every word separately, Sally in her head, me with my iPhone, then we worked our versions together pausing to laugh at my literal translations of colloquial phrases, and then we rewrote, redrafted together mostly on Skype, sometimes in Yorkshire, Valencia, Berlin.

Mario was a generous writer, happy for us to work his Spanish text towards a successful English text.  On May 1st 2016 we launched the English translation os LS6 in LS6 Cafe, Leeds, where the final chapter of the book starts.  You can buy your copy from Dead Ink Books here.

‘A fascinating voyage round the world through the postcodes of Leeds as seen by a dazzling patchwork of international characters. Mario Crespo’s flair and his outsider’s eye makes my hometown a new and surprising place.’ Jeremy Dyson

Being back home a series of Manchester stories have been emerging, here’s Cheshire Life in this beautiful anthology of writers associated with Wakefield’s Red Shed edited by John Clarke available from Currock Press.

I have a piece about mourning and loss in an anthology edited by Ray French and Kath McKay. Based on a blog piece about the funeral of my publisher the poet Janet Fisher, I’ve opened out the piece to explore why people are so surprised by death, and it is the first time I have written properly about my Mum’s early death. You can download the book free on Kindle.

Three small prose fragments on moving to a new place and finding a local, are in this anthology celebrating the British pub edited by Helen Mort and Stuart Maconie. Available from the Poetry Business.