Jenni Fagan - The Panopticon

Paris — it is.

If you go there, you might see me working in a café, watching the people go by: smoking coloured cigarettes and patting my wee dog.

I’ll learn French and get a room on a back street — maybe I’ll walk my rescue-dog by the river four times a day. I’ll go to galleries, and read everything in their libraries, even the manuals, even the papers. I’ll eat chocolate croissants for breakfast. And I won’t take any lovers for ten years. I’ll wash my hair in lavender shampoo. I’ll browse couture shops, and junk bazaars. I’ll go to the Moulin Rouge. I’ll write poetry in the back of dark bars. I’ll watch live sex shows, and wank forty times in a row.

I’m just a girl with a shark’s heart — Frances Jones. You wouldnae know me from anyone else if I walked by you. This is it, I’m getting out. So, Vive freedom. Vive Paris. Vive le mad artists and drunken whores. Vive le girls with tits and hips and perfumes and perfumers. Vive absinthe and cobbled streets, vive le sea! Vive riots and old porn, and dragonflies; vive rooms with huge windows and unlockable doors. Vive flying cats and cigarillo-smoking Outcast Queens! Vive Le Revolution. Vive Le Dreamers. Vive Le Dream.

I — begin today.

Thanks, and appreciation (in no particular order) to:

Jason Arthur, Tracy Bohan, Ali Smith, Joseph Ridgwell, Cherry Smyth, Suzanne Dean, Freddy Chick, Kevin Williamson, Liz Hope, Darran Anderson, Laurie Ip Fung Chun, Michael Langan, Rosie Gailer, Adelle Stripe, Mark Burgess, Emma Finnigan, Dave Oprava, Arts Council England and Iona Davis.

I would also like to thank everyone at William Heinemann and the Wylie Agency.

Jenni Fagan was born in Livingston, Scotland, and lives in Edinburgh. She graduated from Greenwich University with the highest possible mark for a student of Creative Writing, and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA. A published poet, she has won awards from Arts Council England, Dewar Arts, and Scottish Screen among others. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize. Jenni works as a writer in residence, in hospitals and prisons.