Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Carys Davies and Mike Barlow at Manchester Literature Festival

Had a great evening yesterday: John and I went to a superb MLF reading by Mike Barlow and Carys Davies and afterwards the four of us and a friend of Carys's went out to dinner and chewed the writing fat. Carys and I agreed that the longer you go on writing, the harder it is somehow: we both have several stories in stock which simply aren't ready yet, we're just not satisfied with them. Both of us remembered it being so much easier when we first started writing: we wrote stories quickly and got them dispatched for publication swiftly. But the longer you go on, the more complicated are the things you want to do, and the less easy to achieve...

Carys, Mike and I will be reading together at the Huddersfield Literature Festival on March 15th.

2 comments:

Chris Hamilton-Emery said...

There's something wonderfully surreal about that photo of Mike, the crimson drapes, just slightly open to the world, the glitter ball, Mike staring into the camera.

Elizabeth Baines said...

It's quite a surreal place. Just behind that door there are buses roaring by, and you do have a weird feeling of being shut off but right on the edge of the big wide world... Quite good for a poetry reading.