We sat down with Professor Luke Kennard to talk about Black Bag, our July Book Club pick, and honestly we're still thinking about it. 🖤📚
Luke is a poet, novelist and critic. His collection Cane was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2021, and his debut novel The Transition was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime pick. He's now a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Birmingham, and somehow also finds time to review for the London Review of Books, the Telegraph, the Poetry Review and the TLS.
Black Bag follows an out of work actor who gets paid to sit inside a black leather bag as part of a psychology experiment, based on a real 1967 study into the "mere exposure effect", the idea that we come to like almost anything just by being repeatedly exposed to it. Luke told us where the idea actually came from, how a footnote in a completely unrelated academic paper turned into an obsession, and why he was determined to make the costume weirder than the original.
We talked about writing male vulnerability without writing a manosphere book, why the majority experience of a creative life is frustration rather than success, and what it's like judging his students' work while sending his own out to be judged in exactly the same way.
In this episode we chat about:
📖 The real experiment behind Black Bag, and the mere exposure effect
🎭 Writing a passive protagonist who denies his own agency
🧠 Masculinity, emotional dysregulation, and writing men without being didactic about it
✍️ Why failure, not success, is the real story of a creative life
🎓 Teaching creative writing at Birmingham while his own work gets rejected too
🌀 Anne Carson's influence on the shape and rhythm of the book
Head over to Substack for the extended cut, we've got a bonus quick fire round with Luke that didn't make the main episode.
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