Sarah Charsley, who read a brilliant piece at the last sparks event, is organising a new spoken word night. From the Heart is on Friday 5th February, at the New Venture Theatre. It will feature actors reading short stories. Sarah is currently looking for stories up to 1500 words on the theme of love. Full details are in the image below – click to see a larger version.
On December 13th I'm taking a day-trip to Hastings. Despite living there for 6 months, I never explored the Old Town. On Sunday I will put this right. In the evening I will then read my new horror story The Other Child at Short Fuse:
"Sarah and I broke up a year back and we’ve both seen other people since, but she still calls me when there’s a problem. A few months after we split she phoned one Sunday morning because there was a spider in the bath. That time, with the spider, I thought it was an excuse, that she was too embarrassed to say what she really wanted. I flushed the spider, followed her to the kitchen and put my arm around her. It was fairly awkward when Sarah explained that it was just about the spider. I apologised and went back home to bed."
I've been writing a few horror stories lately. Reading horror stories as a teenager, particularly the Best New Horror anthologies, was what made me fall in love with short stories. Most of what I read was disposable, but I also read some truly amazing works.
Short Fuse Hastings takes place at the Jenny Lind, Hastings (TN34 3EW) and starts at 7pm.
My latest post went up last week at the Literature Network – The Six Perils of Writing Workshops:
“Imagine if driving was taught by something like writing workshops. Each session, a group of learners would watch a colleague try a manoeuvre. Afterwards they would take turns to say what they felt went right and what went wrong, with occasional input from an instructor. It would be chaos, and not in a good way. As the New Yorker declared, in a review of Mark McGurl’s history of creative writing programmes and American fiction, The Programme Era, “[workshops are based] on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem”
The full article lists a number of problems with writing workshops. My friend Kay Sexton has written a post listing some other issues, most of which I agree with. She concludes that “a workshop process is a good one, as part of your writing trajectory, or to dip into and out of at various stages in your writing career“.
I’m not currently involved with any writing workshops (I prefer to think of Write Club as an anti-workshop) but they’ve been an important part of my development as a writer. Umi Sinha‘s workshops at CCE taught me a great deal about editing, as well as introducing me to some good friends such as @LaGirafa. I then studied for an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex where the workshops were more theory based but good for examining why I write. At the moment I don’t feel comfortable with writing workshops, but I know my writing has improved in the past through many of the talented people I have workshopped with.
Last night was Sparks 7. I had a great time, despite being nervous – but then I’m always nervous before standing in front of a room full of people. It’s probably a good thing – the only time I wasn’t nervous before reading my performance wasn’t great. Sparks seemed to go OK, and some people said nice things afterwards, so I’m happy.
I enjoyed last night’s readings, especially Naomi Foyle‘s prose poem, and Sarah Charsley‘s piece about going camping for the first time with a new boyfriend. I left early, at eleven and was sorry not to have the stamina to stay up partying with the others. Jo promised a surprise at the end of the night, and read out a letter she’d received that morning from Sarah Charsley. It detailed the things Sarah had learned as a consequence of previous Sparks nights, suggesting a certain amount of debauchery after previous events. (The photo above shows Jo reading from the letter).
I’m very sad to be missing the next Sparks event, in February. It’s a great night.
I've been meaning post some links for ages. Some of these are a few weeks old, but far from stale.
This coming Tuesday I will be reading at Sparks 7, at Brighton's Three and Ten (BN2 1TE). I'm reading my short story finis terrae, which is a little different to my usual work, partly because it features a female narrator:
"He used to call me Finisterre, whispering the name in my ear between kisses to my neck. He’d sleep in my arms after making love and I’d stay awake, watching the sweeping lighthouse beam, the three-second, five-second rhythm of its Light Characteristic. The radio would be on – not the lighthouse set but Mum’s old portable. It never keeps a signal long and through the night it slips from voices to static. I would hold him tight, knowing he’d soon be leaving."
The night starts at 8pm, with entry costing £5. Also reading is my friend, poet Naomi Foyle, who I read with at Short Fuse's erotic fiction night in March. There will also be stories from Sarah Charsley, Chloe Penney, Sam Mead, Gretel My, Jon Heath, Annie Clarkson. Each reading will be accompanied by the backdrop of a specially commissioned photograph.
If recent Sparks nights are anything to go by, there will be drinking and shenanigans afterwards. Do come along if you can!
In a stunning feat of derring-do, poet Tim Clare is attempting to write 100 poems today. Tim Clare is a talented performance poet, who recently played a great set at Hammer&Tongue. He was also part of the show Found in Translation, which I saw in London last year, and the writer of We Can't All Be Astronauts, a lovely book about not being a bestselling writer.
In his blog, Tim has talked about speed poetry, where groups of poets write new work in 10 minutes. This is something I'm very interested in after my experiments with Write Club. In one recent post, Mr. Clare talked about the benefits of speed writing on his work:
"Each speed poetry session, I might hear between three and twenty new poems read out to me by their authors. Each one gave me hints on different ways of approaching the same subject matter or interpreting the same phrase – oh yes, I'd think, a poem can sound like found dialogue, or it can be like a little third-person short story with line breaks, or it can have a chorus like a song, or repeated lines, or take all its similes from a particular lexical field, or be presented as instructions, or just be a list of stuff, or be an open letter to somebody, or be in praise of something, or adopt the style of another type of text like a newspaper report. Slowly, I was building up a repetoire of options for when I got the next title… Doing speed poetry regularly helps abolish a fear of blank pages. You learn to just roll your fucking sleeves up and have a bash."
The attempt starts today at 9:00 GMT and there's a blog set up for the poems. Tim is planning about eight minutes a poem, and will be posting the titles on twitter as he starts each one so people can play along. I'm sorry that I'll be at work most of the day and unable to watch until the evening.
On Friday the 13th it was the Trailer Trash: Zombies vs Vampires night at the Komedia. I performed as part of the group act, which featured a battle between zombies and vampires. I fought Thérèse La Tease and Honour Mission before being killed and resurrected to do the Thriller dance.
It was a fun night, with Rosy compering, becoming increasingly blood-soaked throughout the night. The next Trailer Trash event is on New Year's Eve, and will be themed around Pirates of the Carribean.
Below are some photos taken by Ashley Clark. His main site is here, and he has a huge collection of shots from the night here (including pictures of the Zombies vs Vampires act)
Above: Me with Thérèse La Tease
Above: Rosy Carrick
Above: Me with Jake Spicer
Last night was the second Write Club, run by Ellen de Vries and myself. Write Club is a flash fiction writing event (no, definitely not a workshop) which sprang from Brighton's Write Club networking group. The night has the following rules:
(We work very hard at not making Fight Club references, as shown by my restraint in the list above. But last night did feel a little reminiscent of the movie, with 18 of us in the basement of the Skiff after hours. Word of mouth had brought in more people than last time, some of whom I didn't know personally. For what it's worth, I see Ellen as the Tyler Durden figure).
I felt more nervous this time because of the larger group. I wanted everyone to leave feeling they'd had a worthwhile evening. And it was, of course, guaranteed that I'd have a projector glitch half-way through the night. Even so, I think people enjoyed the evening and the approach we've taken.
I don't know if it was my nerves, but I was less happy in general with the work I produced this time. I found it harder to come up with ideas, facing a blank sheet three minutes through one of the five-minute rounds. Even though Ellen and I choose the pictures, we don't manage to prepare ideas in advance and the prompts end up being as hard for us as everyone else.
Despite feeling less sure about my work, there were two pieces from last night that I'd like to do more with which, I guess, is good going (and better than last time). But the main thing was that I had a fun evening. I heard some amusing, interesting and thought-provoking stories, some of which seemed well-formed despite the short time available.
Ellen and I are still tinkering with the format. Some ideas and prompts have worked well in the last two sessions, other things not so well, but I'm very excited about the third Write Club session, which will be coming soon…
If you want to play along at home, the pictures we chose (CC-licensed photos from flickr tagged with Brighton) were:
Thanks to everyone who came, and thank you to the Skiff for providing a fantastic venue
