Meet ‘Good Things Never Are’, the 8th team in our student-led collaborative project series

Our 3rd years are leading original collaborative projects

This term, our third-year students are hard at work with a range of collaborative projects, including The Pompeii Project, The Wandering Heath, Re: Collective, For Book’s Sake, Sleepeeps and Good Things Never Are. These student-led projects are part of a new module where they consider the writer’s role as part of a creative eco-system, and literature’s role in the creative economy through working on a collaborative project.

On our eighth interview, we talked to Good Things Never Are about their experience so far.

Describe Good Things Never Are

Good Things Never Are is an illustrated anthology of short stories inspired by Dolly’s Tea Room in Falmouth. The stories compiled in this collection draw inspiration from objects within Dolly’s and they will explore love, desire, greed and death. Each story follows a character who is searching for something of a spiritual or material nature.

We are collaborating with Caroline Scamell, local artist and illustrator. Her work matches the style of our collection and we think it will invite readers into this dark, strange and wonderful world.

Why did you choose to do this project?

We all love Dolly’s Tea Room and we have been enchanted by its atmosphere. We wanted to immortalise our attachment to it beyond our time at university. The tea room is full of novelty teapots and strange objects which conjure up images, stories and wonder, so we decided to use them as the starting points for the tales that make up the collection.

Why did you choose an illustrated anthology as the outcome of your project?

The setting is colourful and packed with all these different narratives in every corner, so it made sense to capture this in the form of our project. Each story will have a set of specially commissioned illustrations that will help bring them to life.

Why did you decide to do this for your collaborative project and what do you want to gain?

As we’ve mentioned before, we love Dolly’s and we want to share this with our audience. We want to give something back to Falmouth and our time here, and hope that this will be the first step in building our creative portfolios in a professional context.

What are you most excited about?

We’re very excited to move on to the next step in our project – getting feedback on our stories and polishing them. We are calling for beta readers for each story separately over the coming months, so if you’re interested in that, keep an eye out on our website and social media platforms.

We’re also very excited because we have just received a few of the sample illustrations and they look fantastic! Caroline has done a really great job of bringing out the stories in her artwork and we look forward to sharing them soon.

What’s next for your project?

Good Things Never Arewill be published in July of 2019 as an e-book and paperback and we hope we will be able to do a reading locally, although that is still in the works. If you want to be up to date with our progress and be part of the project, make sure you look for us on social media.