Catch-up again

Here I am once more after a silence. I have to tell you that I am quite jealous of those who can go on blogging while they're engaged on a big or biggish writing project (or can they?). For three weeks recently, while I was in Wales, my days consisted of waking at 7, downing some porridge and then going back to bed with my laptop and typing like mad until about 5, and then needing so badly to move my body that I just went out walking for the remaining daylight, finally collapsing in the pub with mental and physical exhaustion - and, actually, screen fatigue. Since then I have been at my desk, but by the time I've crammed daily household tasks and work as a reader for a literary magazine around the writing, there's been no time or headspace left.

It's been a strange few weeks in other ways. As everyone in the blogosphere knows, on 18th October blogger Norman Geras died, the husband of my dear friend writer Adele Geras, and a beacon of intellectual power and reason for me as well as everyone in the blogging world, which has cast a sadness over the last ten days. I'm also still going through the after-effects of the fall I had in June: for most of the summer I had a very sore arm and was pretty much incapacitated (couldn't put my own coat on!), though it's on the mend now. And the fall so smashed my front tooth that last week I had to have proper dental surgery; not painful actually - I have a wonderful dentist - but it conked me out for a few days.

So I've been pretty much distracted, and missed altogether reporting on the October issue of a new edition of Short Circuit, the Salt book on writing short stories edited by Vanessa Gebbie, with several new chapters by additional authors (I have a chapter in it). It's a wonderful source book, and I often dip into it: nothing like getting other authors' perspectives on the process and learning from them. And I love the new jazzy cover.

I managed to get to four events at the Manchester Literature Festival. Normally I'd have blogged about them in detail, but suffice to say I enjoyed them all. The first was a completely mind-blowing and inspiring event with Ali Smith at the university (the event was also part of a conference on innovative women's writing). Smith read and was interviewed by the university's Kaye Mitchell. Smith's prose is just the bee's knees as far as I'm concerned, and then she turned out to be a charismatic yet informal speaker, and the main message I came away with was the utter seriousness of play in creativity.

The following week I attended two more inspiring events with women writers, running back-to-back at the Anthony Burgess centre: firstly, a Comma event in which short-story writers Alison Mcleod and Jane Rogers spoke about the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and Dostoevsky respectively. Alison pointed out Mansfield's innovation, and really stirred me to go and read her again, and Jane completely opened my eyes (and I think that of many of the audience) to a part of Dostoevsky's oevre of which we had previously been unaware. Following on from this was another reading and discussion with two more women short-story writers, Sarah Hall and Deborah Levy, also chaired by Kaye Mitchell. Sarah Hall read the beginning of her BBC-National-Short-Story-Award-winning story, 'Butcher's Perfume' (published in The Beautiful Indifference [Faber]), and I was again struck by its insights and the steely yet jewel-like glint of its language. Deborah Levy treated us to a haunting story from her book Black Vodka (And Other Stories), and several people I spoke to afterwards said how much they had loved her lilting prose.  Finally, on the penultimate day of the festival, a lovely event in the beautiful Halle St Peter's (a renovated church which is now a rehearsal space for the Halle): two Michaels, Schmidt and Symmons-Roberts, reading stunning poetry - Schmidt from his new book The Stories of My Life (Smith Doorstop) and Symmons-Roberts from his Forward-winning collection Drysalter (Cape).

In recent years I've come to take such readings for granted, but having been cut off from the literary buzz and coming back, I've been reminded that they were out of the question in my small-town background, and I can't help feeling it a privilege to hear writers you admire read their own work and talk about it. And clearly others feel the same: every Lit Fest event I went to was packed, and I understand it was the same for most of the festival, many events selling out right at the beginning.

Oh, I had one other really nice literary evening: a delicious dinner cooked for our book group's tenth anniversary by one of our members, with contributions from others. (Well, actually it was the eleventh, but time has slipped by so quickly we didn't realise that last year was our tenth!) We have another discussion meeting tomorrow, and I haven't even got around to writing up the discussion we had about six weeks ago now...

Staying in and going out

I'm still pretty immersed in my current project, and here's what I'm also doing - against time, before workmen come to do another job - stripping wallpaper and paint: so two things are now keeping me away from my blogs. Today, though, my first reader (John) is looking at my latest draft, and there's a plumber downstairs taking out a radiator in that room, so for once I have time to come to the blog and mention a few events I've attended recently.

Most recent was a great reading yesterday afternoon by short-story writers Adam Marek and Guy Ware, a Comma Press/Manchester Lit Fest event at the Anthony Burgess Centre. Both Adam and Guy have new collections out from Comma, and each read a story from his new book. Although both writers have highly individual voices, they share a surreality married to political consciousness. The lively and quirky title story which Guy read from his collection, 'You Have 24 Hours to Love Us', was the story of the siege of a mountain egg farmer by a political regime, and successfully kept you guessing to the end about the real nature of the protagonist narrator. Adam's story, 'An Industrial Evolution', from the new collection The Stone Thrower, was first commissioned by Comma for Bio-Punk, an anthology of short stories about the potential ethical consequences of current biotechnology research, and imagined Ape Town, a place where orangutans have been rescued by genetic modification from the extinction with which they are in reality threatened, but have been put to an ethically questionable use. A thoughtful and thought-provoking story, beautifully imagined. Comma's Jim Hinks then chaired a very interesting Q & A (above), and afterwards we all repaired to the pub - along with my long-time friend and former co-editor of metropolitan magazine, Ailsa Cox, who'd come with her husband journalist Tim Power (and extremely quiet and gentle dog George!) - it was great to catch up, and made me think I really should get out more!

I haven't managed to attend many Lit Fest events this year, and two I did try for were sold out. I did get to the panel discussion 'Is the Editor Dead?' (also at the Anthony Burgess Centre) - an interesting evening which I'll write about on my Fictionbitch blog when (if!) I get time. [Edited in: I have now managed that: here's the link.]

The Didsbury Arts Festival took place the last weekend in September, and I went to two events, the first a Nightjar Press reading arranged by its publisher Nick Royle. Among the readers were Nick himself with a clever and moving story based around the names of bus routes/destinations, and Alison Moore, whose Booker shortlisted novel The Lighthouse was edited by Nick in one of his other roles as a Salt Publishing fiction editor.  Alison read from The Lighthouse with its emotive atmosphere and evocative prose, as well as her new creepy Nightjar chapbook story. Gregory Norminton read a very clever story (for which he said he owed a debt to JG Ballard) written entirely as footnotes to a biography.  The following night I went to another excellent reading by three more Comma short-story writers, Zoe Lambert, Jane Rogers and Michelle Green.

Oh, and before that, in mid-September, I did a reading of my own, for the Alderley Edge Oxfam Community Book Festival. I was billed for 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, the first slot of the day, so didn't exactly expect an audience, but to my surprise and delight a not-bad-sized audience turned up in the plush blue newly-furbished committee room of the Festival Hall. I read my story 'The Way to Behave' from Balancing, and extracts from each of Too Many Magpies and The Birth Machine.

What else? Oh yes, on Friday I went to J B Shorts, an evening of 15-20 minute theatre plays by established TV writers, at the Joshua Brookes pub. Now several series in, J B Shorts is something of a phenomenon: they do a massive two-week run, yet most evenings are sold out. Tickets are only available on the door, so I went early, arriving half an hour beforehand, but there was already a queue circling right around the pub. By the time I got to the box office there was standing room only, and only four or so people after me got in, the rest being turned away. Apparently it had been like that the night before, the Thursday as well!

Catch Up

Apologies for not blogging much here lately about my comings and goings. It's been a busy  and at the same time a not-so-busy couple of months: I've been taking one of those breaks from writing that you need sometimes - those fallow periods where you let life in (rather than shut it off in order to write) - and blogging seems to have suffered along with the creative stuff.

So what have I been doing? At the end of September there was the Didsbury Arts Festival, at which I gave a reading from The Birth Machine.

I was quite nervous at the start (which I think the above pic shows!) as there was a doctor present, the husband of playwright Debbie Freeman: I was afraid he would think I was attacking the medical profession per se. But he was wonderful, and understood exactly what the book was saying about communication and power, and agreed wholeheartedly. I was also afraid I wouldn't get an audience, as we were in competition with the launch of Nick Royle's Murmurations anthology (I was also sorry not be able to go to that), but the room above the health food shop Healthy Spirit was nicely full. We had an excellent discussion.

If I'd known beforehand that two of the people there were midwives, I might have been nervous about that too, but they were wonderfully supportive and engaged. And every person but one bought a copy of the book - far better sales than I've had at some bigger gatherings! Someone said that the book should be required reading on Obstetric and Midwifery courses - I think I couldn't have had a better compliment. Among other DAF events I managed to get to were the great outdoor theatre and music events outside the library, a spooky reading by Nick Royle under the atmospheric yew trees in the pet cemetery of Parsonage Gardens (both reported on here), a reading by poet Jeffrey Wainwright (always thought-provoking), another by poet Sue Stern accompanied by jazz, and a gig by jazz group Jazzworks.

After that I went back to Wales for a few days, as novelist Jean Mead had kindly invited me to take part on the Saturday in a book fair she had organised at the Quay Hotel in Deganwy. The fair took place in a suite with a wonderful view of the water, and I had a whole table to myself for my display, and once again I sold more books than I feel I could have expected!

Next it was the Manchester Literature Festival. I attended the gala event for the Manchester Fiction Prize, a very interesting debate about prize culture, which I reported on here, a tribute to innovative novelist B S Johnson which sadly dented my admiring view of him with some early films I couldn't help finding adolescent, two excellent Comma Press events - an evening with European short story writers and an afternoon reading by Jane Rogers from their Litmus anthology (stories from science) with a discussion with scientist Martyn Amos - and a very moving tribute to poet Linda Chase who sadly died in April.

I attended Jeanette Winterson's event at The Royal Exchange and reported my impressions here. What else? I went to the cinema and saw We Need to Talk About Kevin, the book of which I have always found hard to get into. I decided it was a hotchpotch of conflicting and half-baked psychological theories - cold mothers create monster children, or maybe they don't, monster children are born like that; macho fathers create monster children, or maybe etc... maybe autism was involved, or maybe not (the doc's test for autism was laughably mistaken, child psych John tells me) - and far too heavy on the blood symbolism which I found as horrifying as the violence they made a point of not showing. I guess I should really read the book now in case the film didn't do it justice.

I went to see C P Taylor's Good at the Royal Exchange, an adaptation of his novel and a tale of how a good man with good motives gets inadvertently involved with Hitler and his henchmen. To begin with I and my companions were entranced: the production seemed wonderful, with music and song and a brilliant use of the stage to create time-slippages that you don't often see in our generally over-literalist theatre. But by the second half we were feeling that the frantic pace was preventing us from concentrating on the moral problem at the heart of the play and the way the transition took place. From what I could tell, that transition was very disappointing: I was expecting a real revelation about the way that apparently moral precepts can be twisted to immoral ends (which I believe they can) but all that seemed to happen was that from the start the protagonist couldn't help acting out of selfish motives that belied his sense of himself as good, and the outcome was thus hardly a surprise. This didn't however seem to worry the rest of the audience, who consisted a great deal of schoolchildren and who went wild with applause.

Meanwhile I have been sinking myself in books, reading in the immersive way I used to as a child, and can't often do when there's too much pressing, especially in terms of my own writing. Among the books I've read are two for the reading group: Helen Garner's The Spare Room (report here) and E L Doctorow's Homer and Langley which I'll report on after we've met to discuss it. I'm a good deal of the way through a re-read of David Copperfield, and I've written here about the particular immersion of that experience, but since then I've been rather pulled out of it by getting to the part where Copperfield meets 'little Dora': such a cypher! I'm also reading Tom McCarthy's C.

Finally, last week I attended a lovely launch for The Coward's Tale (Bloomsbury) the debut novel by my good friend and colleague, Vanessa Gebbie. A smashing way to end a period of relaxation, before I turn my nose in earnest to the writing desk again...

Eureka Commissions at Manchester Literature Festival

Since science and scientific thinking have been preoccupations of both my novels Too Many Magpies and The Birth Machine, I was very interested in the Manchester Literature Festival event on Saturday evening: 'The Eureka Commissions.' In an ongoing project, Ra Page of Comma Press is commissioning short stories around the concept of the 'eureka' moment of scientific discovery - those 'breakthroughs and bolts-from-the-blue that change the game and shift the paradigm', as he puts it in the blurb - and in particular around the understanding that such moments 'are themselves a kind of fiction, a useful apocrypha for simplifying a complex blend of calculated experiment and pure accident.' Each story focuses on a particular moment of scientific discovery and is written after consultation with a scientist, and that evening Stella Duffy and Zoe Lambert were to read from their commissioned stories, and the scientists who had advised them would speak - astrophysicist Tim O'Brien and historian of science James Sumner, respectively.

The meeting was due to be held in the Manchester Astronomical Society's Godlee Observatory at the top of the university's Sackville building, and there was great excitement and security as we, a strictly limited number, gathered. With great ceremony and import we were let through a turnstile one at a time by the Astronomical Society's Tony, who shouted strict instructions after us to wait for him when we got to the top in the lift. Then we were escorted up some tiny wooden stairs to a small room in the centre of which an ornate metal spiral staircase went up - and up and up! - to the observatory above. But in spite of the regimentation things went haywire: only 36 people were allowed in the room at one time, and somehow 40 had ended up there, and we weren't going to be able to have the meeting there after all, but in a lecture room elsewhere. Before that, though, and excitingly, those who wished - and who didn't have vertigo, Tony said - were to be escorted by him in groups of seven up the stairs and into the observatory. I went in the first lot, telling myself, no I didn't have vertigo. And I damn well couldn't afford to have it, as first Tony and then fellow writer Annie Clarkson shot up before me, leaving me climbing much more slowly and gingerly and working on blanking the spaces opening up beneath me through the lacy metalwork, and wondering when on earth the top would come... And, via a precarious metal ladder at the top, out we came into the tiny round space with its domed roof made, apparently, of papier mache, which slides sideways to allow the view of the sky. The telescope, made in Dublin in 1903 for the society which was founded that year, takes up the main floor space. The woman behind me was a bit dizzy, I think, as she arrived at the top, and she kind of swayed towards the telescope, and Tony jumped in alarm and told her to get back and made us all stay flat against the wall, well away from the precious equipment. And now we had to go down, and although I'd come up in high heels I knew there was no way I could go down in them. But then I had my eureka moment: I would carry my shoes in my teeth (no way would I be able to let go of the rails), and so I did, although this had the unfortunate result of obscuring my view of the steps - but then it also had the fortunate effect of obscuring my view of the spiralling spaces below.

We repaired to the lecture room, and Zoe read a moving story about a female chemist (shame on me, I have forgotten her name!) cut out of the discovery of a radio isotope, and Stella Duffy gave us some stunning literary space-time pyrotechnics around that very subject, space-time. Then historian of science James Sumner spoke about the fact that, while eureka moments are a populist concept, in reality they rarely happen: scientific discoveries tend to come about by accretion. The audience didn't seem all that convinced of this. John, whose recent writing of a textbook on the way we learn language seems to have been a whole series of eureka moments - we will be out walking and he'll suddenly get a new insight and have to rush back home - questioned the premise, and another man suggested that scientists themselves believe in eureka moments. James conceded that this last was so, that scientists as well as the public need to believe in such a phenomenon as a way of shaping and narrating events, but held that that didn't mean it was an objective truth. On the other hand, he did also concede that there were moments of sudden movement forwards. He agreed with one questioner who pointed out that some famous discovery - maybe something to do with DNA - was actually made by a third-year undergraduate, and while he seemed to see this as proof of the accretion effect (it wasn't just the famous scientist having the eureka idea) it seemed to me proof rather of the opposite - the eureka moment as the sudden insight of an individual person outside of the system. And surely, I thought, the eureka moment is after all just the moment when all the connections suddenly come together and make a meaning or a proper picture, the 'turning point' that even those arguing against the eureka moment kept referring to. In the end, I decided, maybe it just depends how you define it...

Tim O'Brien, asked what popular misconceptions about science he'd like to address, said that most people like to think that science is about certainty, but in fact science is very much about doubt. I liked this very much, but I also thought 'Tell that to the doctors in The Birth Machine...'

Fleur Adcock, Amanda Craig and Michele Roberts at the Manchester LIterature Festival

I really only woke up to the Manchester Literature Festival on Tuesday when I came to a lull in publicity for The Birth Machine. I sat up and looked around and realized that the festival was already in full swing, so that evening John and I headed off to Manchester Museum to hear the poet Fleur Adcock. We all sat in the Prehistoric Life Gallery under a huge suspended dinosaur skeleton beside a mock-up of a prehistoric forest. The sense of the past pressing in and physically coming to life again was fitting, as the engaging, accessible and pithy poems Fleur read were very concerned with the past, her new book Dragon Talk centring on her own childhood, and indeed she talked interestingly about how as you get older your own childhood becomes a history, linked with the events occurring in the greater world. In fact, the past kept popping up all round: in front of us sat someone who turned out to be poet Tony Roberts with whom I'm reading in a couple of weeks at the Bolton Octagon: I hadn't met him before, but John had met him some years ago. And afterwards we all went for a drink - just like the old days.

Then yesterday I went to the lunchtime event at Waterstone's: Amanda Craig and Michele Roberts. A very good turnout for lunchtime, but only two men in the audience, I noticed, which seems to support the notion that women are the majority of fiction readers. It was a very interesting session. Amanda Craig was talking about her latest novel, Hearts and Minds, a novel concerning the murder of an au pair in a contemporary London which is, after all, not too far from the London of Dickens. I found Amanda a particularly engaging and intelligent speaker: she talked of being struck by how little London has really changed in terms of its underbelly, and how little this is actually addressed in fiction. She told us that the novel came from first her growing awareness that so many people in the services industries in London now come from other countries and then from her own experience of falling seriously ill and finding that those people she needed to employ to help her were indeed from abroad. As a result of her illness, her novel took her seven years, and was, she admitted in answer to an audience question, at times harrowing to write. Some people, she said, had been upset by its depiction of London, which they didn't recognise, but she assured us that, the result of her research interviewing prostitutes and trafficked girls, it was accurate. The beginning of the novel, which she read out to us, was in my view stunning - beautifully written as well as ultimately shockingly dramatic.

Michele Roberts is a writer whom I've always thought of as a fellow spirit - we were after all both published by the same publisher early on. She's a more experimental writer than Amanda Craig, I think: in keeping with her sense of the continuity of London's underbelly, Amanda consciously writes, she said, in the tradition of Dickens, but Michele plays with voice and our concepts of reality, and it seemed when she began talking that the two writers would provide a contrast. Michele was reading from her new book of short stories, Mud: Stories of Sex and Love . Beforehand she talked about how sex and love have become difficult subjects to write about, and that a lot of writers now seem to avoid it: you have to get around the cliches about love and sidestep pornography and the fact that sex and love have become artificially separated in our culture - if you don't use the language of either the clinical or the pornographic gaze, what language do you use? Therefore, typically I think for her, she found it a challenge, and what she's interested in in writing this book, she says, is the complexity of both sex and love - all kinds of love including non-sexual love, and the stories of those whom the language of newspapers objectifies even when taking a positive stance.

Then she read to us from a stunning story in the book about a trafficked girl forced into prostitution and suddenly - since Amanda's novel hinges on the rescue of such a girl - the work of both authors dovetailed dramatically. (I was particularly interested at this point, as my most recently published short story also features such a girl.) The authors agreed wholeheartedly about the transformative power of London, and the way it provides transitional spaces, both in reality for people wanting to start again and as the setting for stories exploring complexity and eschewing the false divisions of good and bad. Both spoke of London as a living creature, Amanda referring (in answer to a question about the effects of the recession) to its heartbeat and its dystolic/systolic rhythms of change of expansion and contraction. Both said that they mined it for stories, Michele giving us a vivid picture of herself trudging in a huge coat and boots and constantly getting chatting on street corners to people who pour out their stories to her.

Both agreed that fiction is both about change and can effect change - something has to happen in a story which brings about change - but also reading a story can change you, shift your perceptions. Stories too, Michele said, can help us to recognise change in our own lives.

Someone asked if in consciously giving voice in their writing to people who didn't have a voice in life, the authors felt an extra special responsibility of authenticity. Michele said that one has to always acknowledge that fiction is making things up and that one's first responsibility as an author is to the story. Amanda, however, did feel that, since the characters of her novel were indeed based on real people she'd interviewed, she felt some responsibility to be true to their experience - and added that much of what she'd included in the novel was only the tip of the iceberg of that experience, in spite of the fact that some people had objected to the 'over-grim' portrayal.

And then it was out into the lovely sunny streets of Manchester and the posh shops of King Street, though it's true that a few of them are now empty, and there weren't that many shoppers about, and there was the Big Issue seller on the corner, and the echoes of the authors' writing following me all the way home...

Literary Manchester

There's been so much literary happening recently, but I've been so busy with my own stuff I haven't had time to blog about much of it. First there was the Manchester Literature Festival, of which I only managed to blog the Fay Weldon event (briefly, and without reference to what she actually said). I put up some pics of Northern Salt which I took part in myself, but haven't even managed to blog it before now. Fortunately you can read detailed accounts of most of the events on the Manchester Festival blog.

Northern Salt was great fun. Not only was I reading with three other Salt authors - John Siddique, Mark Illis, and Robert Graham - but several other Salt authors came to the event: Steve Waling, Andrew Philip, Paul Magrs and Tony Williams, though Tony's train didn't get him there for the reading and he arrived as we were leaving the Whitworth, just in time not to miss us altogether, so he was able to come for coffee with us afterwards. Looking at that list I see I was the only girl amongst the boys (I didn't notice at the time: see, I just think of myself as one of the boys!), but then our lovely publisher Jen had come all the way up from Cambridge for the event, with a bag full of books for us all to sign, and Tony's brand-new copies. Also some of my female friends came to listen: among them my actor friend Mary-Ann Coburn, my erstwhile co-editor and short-story writer Ailsa Cox, and Ann French from the reading group - a real sacrifice from Ann, I'd say, since she surely spends enough time at the Whitworth as its textile conservator! Not that I even realized they were there until the end, as the audience was amazingly big for a Sunday afternoon. As we readers sat on the front row waiting for the start, Robert wanted to know which of us it was who had so many friends! MLF's Cathy Bolton gave us glowing introductions (as Robert said, it made you think: Is she talking about me?) and I loved the readings the others gave. The questions took us a little by surprise: I guess it's hard not to ask general questions of a largish group of writers, and we ended up talking about teaching creative writing and being published by a small independent, and even the somewhat academic question of the difference between poetry and prose! Here we are on the left wondering about the audience behind us:



What else besides MLF? Well, I went to a packed final evening of JB Shorts - the evening of short plays by TV writers at the Joshua Brooks pub - or rather, correction, I went to the second part of the final evening, having attended Michael Schmidt's memorable darkened launch at the Epinay champagne bar first. (Below is my pic of Michael reading by mobile phone flashlight), missing Trevor Suthers' play which I'd been particularly keen to see, not only because I'd promised him I'd go but because I'd been told it was brilliant. I was especially disappointed when, arriving, I found that actor Arthur Bostrom had been in it. The second half, which included a black comedy by Dave Simpson and a startling take on Brief Encounter by Peter Kerry, was excellent, and I'm not surprised that the whole enterprise has been nominated for a Manchester Evening News award. (There are also 12 24:7 nominations for this award, including several from three of the plays I put forward after initial reading because I loved them, and so I'm really chuffed).



Then on Thursday there was the first in this year's MMU series of readings, the launch of books from Carcanet by the innovative Matt Welton and Jeremy Over who was new to me. Adrian Slatcher offers his take on the evening over at The Art of Fiction. And last night John and I managed - just in time - to see Punk Rock by Simon Stephens at The Royal Exchange, which I expected much of but was rather disappointed in. About a group of students in a Stockport private-school library, it seemed to me a play which couldn't decide on its own focus and theme, and the Columbine-school-style ending struck me as lazy and gratuitous, inadequate as a pay-off for the various issues the play had raised. Plus, the loud music between scenes not only added nothing but was almost enough to make us throw ourselves off the top gallery where we were sitting.

Maybe I'll stay in a bit now...

Fay Weldon at the Manchester Lit Fest

To the Friends' Meeting House last night for my first Manchester Lit Fest event: Fay Weldon promoting her new novel Chalcot Crescent, an innovative blend of fiction and fact in which Fay's real-life never-born sister lives after all and grows up to supplant Fay in all of her real-life circumstances. How juicy!

But where was the real-life Fay? The clock ticked past the hour at which the event was meant to begin, and then we were told that Fay was delayed, having encountered at least two accidents on the motorway, but she would be there in ten or fifteen minutes. We waited. We talked: I had plenty to talk about: I had sat down and found myself next to a neighbour from years ago, someone I hadn't seen for years, and not only that, she had lived on the other side of the neighbour I'd had precisely the same experience with a couple of weeks ago at the Didsbury Arts Festival (the three of us had lived side-by-side in a row)! See, Fay is right: life is just as weird as fiction...

The clock ticked on. Quarter past... twenty-five past. Director Cathy Bolton came to the mic gain. Fay had been taken by her sat nav to a Mount Street in Trafford, and would now have to find her way back here... See, sat navs can't sort out the facts, either...

Then at almost a quarter to, the call went up 'Fay is in the building!' but since she didn't appear immediately, probably needing to go to the bathroom, a doubt about the fact settled in the air, which everyone seemed happy to accept.

And then at last she came, a little breathless, a little shaken, even, it seemed, and had to negotiate the fifteen-inch step up on to the stage, but her customary grin never left her face, and she proceeded to give us the benefit of her humour and wisdom.

No wonder we were all prepared to wait.

Manchester Lit Fest: The Hub

What with Paris and coming back to a lot of stuff to catch up on, I haven't yet got around to the Manchester Literature Festival. However, I'm planning to go to a couple of events at the new 'Festival Hub' tonight and tomorrow. I've thought that the one thing the festival lacked in its first two years was a central meeting and relaxing point, and this year, the festival's third, they've set one up in the Northern pub in Tib Street, where free early-evening events will also take place. Tonight it's blogger Belinda Webb reading from her debut novel, A Clockwork Apple, and tomorrow it will be my fellow Salt authors, short-story writer Carys Davies and poet Mike Barlow who was shortlisted for the prestigious new Manchester Poetry Prize.

So I'd better get on with some of my reading before I need to leave the house...

No need to book, apparently.

Gearing up for the Blogstory, Manchester magazines and a reading

Just back from a meeting at Cornerhouse with Manchizzle blogger and writer Kate Feld, the brains behind the Manchester Blogstory commission. We talked about the story: less than a week to go now, and I've started on the first episode, which goes online next Tuesday - scarey! I haven't found it exactly easy coming up with a scenario which fits the format, allowing enough possibilities for developments of the story without creating dead ends. But I think I'm managing it, and I'm pretty hooked on the characters, so I hope others will be. I discovered that Kate conducted an interview for last winter's issue of Manchester's pretty impressive Revolvewire magazine (still on sale at Cornerhouse) with Sarah Hepola, who between 2004 and 2005 wrote a similar interactive fictional blog, The Education of Elisabeth Edelman, for the internet magazine The Morning News. In the interview Hepola says that she found reader interaction created a more boring story than she would have liked - people constantly voted for the safe options for her character - so I hope that doesn't happen here!

Kate and I also talked about the workshop we are running together in the run-up to the festival on 29th September (11 am - 1 pm at Manchester Digital Development Agency) for creative writers interested in beginning a blog or increasing their blogging skills in order to develop and promote their own writing.

And before I left, the brochure for the Festival arrived in the post - it looks like a great eclectic line-up of events.

And speaking of Manchester magazines, I'm delighted that this very morning Jen, my publisher at Salt, invited me to take part in a joint reading with Salt and the splendid litmag Transmission which specializes in short stories. (MMU at 6.30 on Thursday 11th October; MMU readings are open to the public.)

Change at Commonword and Bitch-Lit still going strong

To Taurus bar last night for a leaving drink for Cathy Bolton, Commonword's innovative and inspirational publisher, who will be sorely missed. She's not going far, though - just down the road, and in fact to the part of town where Commonword began: after stepping in as Acting Director of Manchester Literature Festival last year, she is this year taking up the post of Director.

One piece of news was that Commonword's Bitch-Lit anthology (which includes my story The Way to Behave) is still going strong: Maya Chowdhry, Mary Sharratt, Michelle Green & Cath Staincliffe will be performing in character again at Manchester's Central Library on International Women's Day, March 8th, 1-2pm (Committee Room, 2nd Floor), and next week Maya, Char March and Brighid Rose will perform at London's Split-Lit Festival.

Maya also told me that we had had a really TERRIBLE review on the web, and of course I came straight home and Googled it. Omigod, so she didn't get that any of the stories were IRONIC!!! Is it not clear that they are ironic?!!! Should I not put mine in my collection, therefore? EEK!!

From the sublime to the wicked

Yesterday I went to the talk by Murat Belge in St Ann's Church - an event I found quite mind-blowing, and which I've written about on my other blog where I try to tackle the more serious matters.

Afterwards I wandered a bit gloomily, musing how in Britain we just don't value serious literature any more, when we damn well ought to: after all, the issues Belge was talking about, and in the novels he publishes by Nobel-Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, are even now being played out in Britain, not least in the current comments by British politicians about the veil.

And then I went into Waterstone's and found something to cheer me right up: there in the anthology section was Bitch-Lit, our light-hearted anthology with nevertheless a pretty serious point, turned out in all its bright-pink glory. Not only that, someone was reaching up to look at a copy! I tip-toed away, thinking, Good Old Waterstones, and Three Cheers for our lovely publisher Cathy Bolton at Commonword!!

Manchester Literature Festival

The Manchester Literature Festival, conceived by outgoing director Chris Gribble and built on the foundations of the Manchester Poetry Festival, kicks off on Thursday, and it looks pretty exciting. I'll be sorry to miss William Boyd that day, as I'm already committed to my reading group, but I'm looking forward to the Amnesty International event on Freedom of Expression in St Ann's Church on Saturday afternoon and to Sebastian Barry at the University of Manchester at six on Monday. Sometimes as a writer you JUST DON'T GET OUT, but I've got an embarrassment of choices later on Monday evening: free tickets to a rarely-performed Tennessee Williams play at the Library Theatre, cult artist and musician Ed Barton reading his poetry at Matt and Phred's, or the Manchester Blog Awards at Urbis. How on earth can I choose? Maybe I'll get a migraine trying...

I'm extremely sorry to be missing the launch of novelist Nick Royle's first short story collection at Matt and Phred's on Tuesday, not least because we published him in metropolitan, but that night I'll be doing the Sheffield Bitch-Lit event. Apparently, to our great delight, the Manchester Bitch-Lit event at Waterstone's on Thursday has long been booked out. Sharon Olds at Manchester Museum on Wednesday is a must-see, I'd say, as well as the 'Celebrating Burgess' event at the Whitworth Gallery on Friday, and the exciting festival-within-a-festival of Palestinian literature and the Decapolis European short story events.