MY PATH TO PUBLICATION
Saba Sams
The author of debut short story collection Send Nudes remembers how writing set her free as a teenager
I was first introduced to the idea that I could write in an A-Level English Literature class. I grew up in Brighton and went to a sixth-form college up behind the station. It was a half-hour walk and included a very steep hill. At the bottom of the hill was a viaduct which housed what felt like Brighton’s entire population of pigeons. When I think of college, I think of feathers and pigeon shit and writing.
‘I wasn’t a particularly happy teenager. Before college, I spent three years at a private school whose single mission was to churn out excessively high grades. That school was a business, and every student could feel it. I have more friends from there with eating and anxiety disorders than anywhere else, and I went to eight different schools (if you include universities). Private schools are wrong for multiple reasons, and one of them is this.
‘At the state college I joined for sixth-form, my English Literature class took a module in which we were each asked to write a short story. It was the kind of module that would never have been chosen at my previous school, where teachers openly discouraged students from taking arts subjects. We studied Jon McGregor’s This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You for inspiration. It was the first short story collection I’d read, as well as the first contemporary book I’d studied, and I was intrigued. The stories felt brave, fresh and full of risk.