Auditioning

I went for an audition today. I must be mad. I am: I don't even have to do this for a living, my career doesn't depend on it. So there I am getting dressed. What shall I wear? Well, I want to look interesting in my own right, of course (one has to get attention!), and switched-on and competent, but I also have to give some idea of my ability to inhabit the (somewhat sad) character I'm reading for.

OK, so I've made my decisions, I'm dressed, I'm off on the bus to the theatre. As I emerge from the cubicle in the theatre loo another woman is washing her hands, and I see immediately the tell-tale signs sticking out of her bag: the actor's failsafe bottle of water, the bundle of papers which is clearly the script. We eye each other swiftly and smile: camaraderie and rivalry hopelessly entwined: Is she better than me? She's bound to be, she'll be trained... Does she look more the part? I think perhaps she does...

Well, they liked my reading, the writer and the director. But then there were those looks passing between them, and I can guess what they were thinking, that thing I've thought myself as a playwright auditioning actors: Pity, she just didn't look the part...

Reading group: The Gathering by Anne Enright

Jenny looked pretty intent as we gathered in her living room, and when we were all seated she asked in some disgust, 'Who chose this?' I think she thought it was me, since when Clare had offered it as one of her two alternative suggestions I'd persuaded everyone to choose it over the other possible book.

Clare looked a bit non plussed, but went ahead with her admiring introduction. She thought it was wonderfully written, she said. It was a very bleak book in many ways: the first-person narration of 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty who is grieving her brother Liam's suicide and coming to terms with it by imagining the events at the heart of a family secret which may or may not have led to it. But the writing transcended the bleakness of the subject matter, Clare said: lively, witty and full of the most stunning phrases. She was most struck by the scene which Veronica first imagines early on, that of the first meeting between her grandmother Ada as a young woman and Lamb Nugent, a man she could have married but didn't, marrying his best friend instead. However, Clare had one criticism: these scenes were so beautifully imagined and written that she didn't feel that they were realistically Veronica's (as we are meant to take them), but were too much those of the author. I said that this too been Adam Mars-Jones's only criticism, just about, in his review for the Independent, and (although I loved this book so much I was loathe to criticize it) I supposed I had to agree that the register wasn't exactly Veronica's, although it hadn't struck me as I was reading it.

At which point everyone else began laying into this book. Ann said that she had liked the beginning too, but she felt it went nowhere; as she went on reading it she was thinking, 'Come on!' 'Come on what?' asked Clare, but if Ann gave an explanation it was overridden by the others' criticisms so I don't remember it. John said he too was disappointed: he had thought the book was going to be about uncovering the mystery of how Liam died, but it turned out to be something far more amorphous. Trevor and Doug said that they liked the Ada stuff but not the rest, or maybe they said the opposite, or maybe one expressed one view and the other the other, but Jenny came in most memorably with the firm view that the book was terrible and she had no idea how it could have won the Booker. None of it was consistent or made sense, she said: nothing happened, it was all conjecture.

I said, but that's the point: it's a book about not knowing, and how we deal with that. Jenny countered that none of the characters were realized: you were expected to take for granted the close relationship between Veronica and her dead bother Liam: it was never shown except for perhaps one childhood scene when they stole into a bus garage; and Veronica's estrangement from her husband over the loss of Liam is never made understandable. And look at Veronica's other brother Mozzie: he's supposed to have been a psychopath, as Veronica calls him, and then he's supposed to have this miraculous change at the end and be some kind of nice family man: you're just expected to take that on trust, and it's just not believable.

I said, But isn't that all about Veronica's perception of him, which changes? Isn't this a book about that very thing, perception, and how we make up stories about other people and give them characters in order to cope?

Jenny looked even more disgusted and said that I was putting a spin on the book it didn't deserve: these things just weren't there.

I have to say I had had one niggle about the book and now someone honed in on it: the connections that we are indeed meant to take on trust between the circumstances which led to the sexual abuse of Liam as a child and Liam's adult emotional problems and suicide. Would Liam really have been that affected by it? people asked. Clare said, Well, it depends what the abuse means to the child. Abuse is most damaging when the child is emotionally involved with the abuser. We all agreed that this must be so. But Liam could not have been emotionally involved with his abuser, and people cited examples of others they knew, including spouses, who had similarly experienced abuse by a family friend but without growing up to be emotionally disturbed by it. But then Clare pointed out a moment in the book which even I, its great champion, had missed (and which I won't give away here), and everything fell into place.

This moment is fleeting, though vivid. Once you catch it it is devastating, and in retrospect justifies the whole structure of the book and Veronica's speculations. At this point in the discussion even I began to wonder if the glancing, allusive prose which I love in Anne Enright's work does sometimes militate against her.

Doug now asked us what we thought about the sex, which he had found so graphic it was somehow disturbing. People agreed and wondered about it without coming to any conclusions, and the discussion turned, with some relief it seemed, to a general consideration of sex. In fact, said Doug, getting back to the book, he had found the whole book disturbing. He had certainly admired the prose, and he was glad he had read the book but he had found it extremely painful to read.

Clare and I were stunned, insisting that it was witty, even funny, only to be met with sceptical stares. Jenny reiterated that she thought it was awful.

Some days later Hans called round at our house to find out about the next meeting, and we discovered why Jenny had informed us so meaningfully yet cryptically that he wasn't coming to the last one. He hated the book, he told me. He had travelled back from Glasgow that day and he couldn't face sitting talking about a book with which he had utterly failed to engage, and which he had found frankly pretentious.

His wife Jan had liked it, though...

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

The Salt Frank O'Connor Prize Blog

Want to read all about the Salt books on the Frank O'Connor long list - an astounding eight story collections, including my own, Balancing on the Edge of the World?

Then go to the The Salt Frank O'Connor Prize Blog, where you can also read and watch interviews with the authors, hear clips from their stories and see photos of their readings and launches.

Why prose fiction is sometimes the best option for writers

Who'd be a writer of films in this world of images?

I've twice had a go, experiences I satirized in one of the short stories in my collection Balancing, 'The Shooting Script', which I read on Thursday at Manchester Central Library to an audience which always includes some writers, and which responded on this occasion with wry heartfelt laughter. I don't want to boast, but Adele Geras said in a review that this story should be 'required reading for anyone who fancies themselves writing for television.'

But it's not just the structures of the industry which divest writers of power (as this story indicates), it's the requirements of the form.

On Saturday I went to a screening of a short student film which I took part in as an actor last summer. Well, I loved being in this film: I love acting, I love the camaraderie (such an antidote to the isolation of the desk!) and I loved being part of the team working on the vision of the two writer-directors. But that's just it: you are part of a team, and there's never a guarantee that everyone on that team will share the vision of the writer or indeed respect it. And let's face it, when there's a camera and an editing suite at the heart of things it's the person behind the camera and/or with their finger on the computer button who wields the power to impose their own vision. On this occasion it didn't matter, because the writers were also the directors, and bitter past experience had taught them that they needed to do their own editing.

But just how much script writers can be marginalized by the form itself was illustrated for me when I finally saw the film at a screening in a bar on Saturday afternoon. I ordered up the film (it was on the 'menu' from a bar as part of a mini film-festival) and a fortifying glass of Chardonnay (seeing yourself on film playing an overalled cleaner and later naked in a bath is NOT an ego-stroking experience!) (and nearly choked at the exorbitant price of the wine) and settled down in the dark alcove set aside for viewing.

The film opened with beautiful shots, as I knew it would, of empty offices at night time, with the lone cleaner (me) silhouetted as she busied away in the vast spaces, strangely competent yet vulnerable - scenes which we never even rehearsed: I just turned up on the appointed night and we did it. Later the film cuts, as intended, to a kitchen in a house and here the dialogue begins. But they had cut half the dialogue! Half the ruddy dialogue, which we had laboured to learn (it was difficult dialogue to learn, because it was deliberately confused, illogical and inconsequential, as the characters were stressed) and which we had rehearsed over and over...

What had happened here was that image had squashed out the words: rightly, as it happened, because the way the film begins sets up a certain grammar which needed to be fulfilled, but also because sometimes - or indeed more often, in films - image is enough to tell the story: one closeup of me saying nothing but closing my eyes was more expressive and convincing than the speech which had followed the gesture but was now cut.

Writing for film is thus not so much the writing of a script - based in dialogue - but the provision of a kind of choreography of image. It's an interesting challenge, but you could ask: Why bother, when it's the director and the cameraman who really have the power to create and choose the images? And it's not surprising, I guess, that so many directors, like the two on this film, 'write' their own.

Quill Magazine Interview

I feel very privileged to have been interviewed by Quill editor Eric Forbes for his blog and for the July-September issue of the magazine, along with three other authors also long-listed for the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award: Clare Wigfall, Nam Le and Wena Poon. Eric describes himself in these terms which are succour to the hearts of all writers and committed readers:

I am a book editor who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I am hopelessly in love with books and the freedom to read whatever makes me happy: fiction and nonfiction. I have always been obsessed with the relationship between literature and life and its role in society. As an editor, I have edited many books, both good and bad, but never get tired of the grand adventure of reading. We must never underestimate the redeeming power of fiction in our lives.

Salt reading at Manchester Central Library

So there we were on Thursday in the impressive wood-panelled committee room in Central Library, with its amazing marbled fireplace, four authors all published by Salt, Carys Davies, Andre Mangeot, Shamshad Khan and yours truly. The audience, though smallish, was a great one, laughing gratifyingly in all the right places - at Carys's wry story Boot about a dog who gets the better of his owners, at my satirical story The Shooting Script about a conman arts worker - and murmuring appreciatively at the touching story which Andre read from A Little Javanese (which had only come from the printer's the previous day!). And we all sat spellbound as Shamshad had the lights turned out and then, in the dimness, wove her customary performance magic with her voice and the words of her poems.

First off was Carys reading from her fantastic collection Some New Ambush:


Next up was Andre:


















Because Shamshad read in the dark we didn't get any photos of her reading from her poetry collection Megalomania, so here she is afterwards chatting to me:


Finally, I read from Balancing on the Edge of the World, and here below is an instructive photo for all writers, reminding you to get your hair out of your face when you're reading, and try not to gurn when you're doing the characters!













And here we are chatting afterwards:

Salt reading and workshop

Tomorrow (Thursday 22nd May) I'll be taking part in a Salt reading at Manchester Central Library 1-2 pm, Committee Room, 2nd Floor. Free. I'll be reading from my story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World. Carys Davies will also be reading from Some New Ambush, her wonderful collection of short stories which is up for the Wales Book of the Year Award, Manchester performance poet Shamshad Khan will be stunning us all with her Salt poetry collection Megalomania, and we'll hear Andre Mangeot read stories from A Little Javanese which is hot off the press today!!

You can read more about the event here.

And on Saturday I'll be reading and running a workshop for the Chorlton Arts Festival at Chorlton Library 11.30 am - 1.30 pm. Also Free.

Edge Hill Prize shortlist

So here's a prize I didn't get on the shortlist for:

Tania Hershman sends me this:

The second Edge Hill Prize shortlist was announced on Saturday 10 May, at the climax of the Oceans of Stories Conference, hosted by Liverpool John Moores University and Edge Hill University. Author Helen Simpson presented the shortlist, which was selected by three judges: author Hilary Mantel, BBC Producer Duncan Minshull, and Prof. Rhiannon Evans.

The shortlist in full is:

Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
The Separate Heart by Simon Robson (Jonathan Cape)
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (Faber and Faber)
The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardam (Chatto and Windus)
Old Devil Moon by Christopher Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)


It's hard to comment if you're involved (though I don't even know if I was involved, since each publisher was allowed to enter only two books and my publishers Salt would have had to choose between several of the short story collections they have published this year). So apart from noting that, unlike the Frank O'Connor long list, this one leans towards established publishers (Comma being the one truly small press), I'll confine myself to saying many congratulations to these authors.

More about the prize here.

To innovate or not to innovate

I've been thinking about innovation and I've embarked on a series of short stories which are a departure from any of my previous styles. While I love a good plot and I'm a sucker for imagery, I've been getting increasingly cynical about the power of conventional narrative tropes to express our post 9/11 condition of uncertainty. The contingency of story has always been a running theme in my fiction, but now I'm thinking that character and metaphor are closed circuits unable to express our current loss of existential grasp, and above all that narrative arc is just one big - but impotent - authorial con, and in these new stories I've been trying to find a way to question them without ditching them altogether.

It can be really scary doing something new. There's no guarantee that other people will see what you doing - rather than assume you're just making a mistake, failing to achieve the conventions you're actually questioning - or if they do that they'll find it palatable. And no guarantee that you're not failing unless someone else tells you you're not. So it was with great relief that I heard this week that the last one I wrote has been accepted by an exciting new online magazine Horizon Review, named after Cyril Connelly's original Horizon, coming from the Salt umbrella and edited by poet and novelist Jane Holland. In fact, on the Horizon website Jane says that she is indeed open to writing that dares to take risks, and wishes to make the mag a place of question and challenge.

It so happened that the other day, via the Story website, I came across some pertinent comments in an article by AL Kennedy. She says rightly that the magazines that used to print stories have largely disappeared and instead:

they're left to be harried by endless small-scale competitions that merrily dictate size, content, themes and even title options.

Yes, this is the rub. Competitions which impose such restrictions (and that's most of them, as she says) make my heart sink, because they always imply certain expectations or certain acceptable norms, which simply cannot apply to innovative writing, and cannot encourage the innovative urge in writers. Clearly innovative stories do sometimes win competitions, but it seems to me a triumph over circumstance when it happens.

Balancing on the Edge of the World on Frank O'Connor Longlist

Well, along with 38 other short story collections, including 7 wonderful others from my fabulous publisher Salt. I'm always going on, on my other blog, about the invidious aspect of literary prizes, and the way that choosing some books over others for long lists and short lists inevitably bestows negative associations on the books omitted. But this international prize, The Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, was set up specifically to draw attention to the short story and to publicize collections which have appeared within the year, and, as a function of this, the long list is deliberately inclusive.

This list is a thermometer showing the robust health of the re-emerging short story, a map of its geographical growth and an indication of the areas of publishing in which it is thriving. As last year, it shows that it is within independent publishing that the short story is thriving, and this year that Britain is now the great home of the short story. There are 8 collections here from the US, 5 from Ireland, 4 each from Australia and New Zealand, 1 each from Singapore, Taiwan and Nigeria and a whopping 14 from Britain, including 8 from Salt, who are thus announced as the Biggest Champions of the Short Story in the World!!!

What to do on a writing retreat

Writing retreats. Joel Rickett reports for the Guardian that they've gone so exotic that you can now go on 'literary adventure holidays' to places like Thailand with recitals and elephant trekking laid on.

Writing retreats? You've got to be kidding me. I've been on two fairly conventional British writing weekends, but the last thing I could do was write I was so busy watching the writing tutors preen and compete with each other, the students getting off with each other and the retreat managers getting cross either because someone had used the spare room for an assignation or because no one would bring the wood in for the fire!!

A proper book tag

I don't normally like tags of course, but this time I'm really happy to be tagged by Norm with this good one:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

My nearest book was happily one I love, a volume of short stories, The Loudest Sound and Nothing by Clare Wigfall. I was (and am) sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs: it's where I banish my computer when I'm working hard on a first draft, which I always do in longhand, or trying to get back to writing after a disruption, which I am now, after John's recent illness. The Loudest Sound and Nothing was sitting on the top step ready to go downstairs to the shared bookshelves: tidying my study is another way back into writing for me, so that's what I'd been doing.

Page 123 was unfortunately blank, so I turned to the next printed page, 125, where the story 'Night after Night' begins, and here's what I ended up with, just one example of the multifarious voices in the book:

I couldn't for the life of me think why they'd be ringing on us. Took off me apron and fluffed up me hair in case the two bobbies at the door was going to want to come in, but then Stan come back with his coat and hat on and tells me he's gotta go down to the station to answer a couple of questions.

'Couple of questions?' I said. 'What do they want with you?'

I'm tagging Debi Alper, Ms Baroque, Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie and Charles Lambert, who can ignore it of course if they wish.

Reading group: The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Three parallel narratives, featuring respectively Virginia Woolf struggling with her demons, a young woman, Laura Brown, trapped in suburban motherhood in the nineteen-forties and longing to escape and read Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, and a middle-aged woman Clarissa arranging a party in the nineteen-nineties for an old lover who is dying of Aids and who once nicknamed her Mrs Dalloway after that fictional Clarissa.

Ann, who had suggested this novel, said that in the event she wasn't sure what she thought of it, as she didn't feel that the perspectives of the three women were sufficiently differentiated and in particular she couldn't get to grips with the Laura Brown character: she understood the trap Laura was in but couldn't see how such a strong-willed character could have got into such a trap in the first place.

This caused some surprise: others felt on the contrary that the characters were very well differentiated, and those who had grown up in sixties suburbia in Britain had found Laura Brown and her position entirely recognizable. Indeed, everyone else thought this book was wonderful - even Jenny. Initially Jenny had resisted the idea of this book as she didn't like parallel narratives, but even though the connections between the different strands had seemed superficial she had found it absorbing, and in any case at the end it is revealed that they are not separate stories at all.

We had quite some discussion about this last. Trevor said that when he suddenly realized the connections so near the end he wondered if he had been really thick in not guessing them before. I said I didn't think so: I thought it had been deliberate structural strategy on Cunningham's part to spring a surprise. I thought that there was nothing so moving as to discover that an old woman you were despising along with one character was in fact the same person as a young woman you'd been identifying with, and Hans strongly agreed.

On the other hand, I couldn't help questioning this strategy, since had we known the connections as we were reading there would have been resonances which inevitably we missed - though as Jenny said, the thing about great literaure is that it makes you want to read it again, and on a second reading we would experience them.

I think we were in no doubt that this was great literature. John had been seriously ill while I had been reading it, and the book's overriding theme of death had at times made it quite difficult for me to read, yet I had always gone back to it: it had seeped into my consciousness the way great literature does. The only other quibble was Doug's: he wondered about the occasional breaches of the novel's convention when we are given the viewpoint of minor characters; yet Doug was perhaps one of the greatest admirers of this book.

It wasn't overall a long discussion. It was the kind of occasion, I think, where a book hits you in the gut, and intellectual discussion seems not quite the point.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Balancing on the Edge of the World reviewed on Stuck in a Book

Simon Thomas at Stuck in a Book reviews Balancing:

Baines' stories are executed with a subtle smoothness, and a precise portrayal of human relationships - both the surface of them, and what goes on underneath.

His favourite in the collection is 'Compass and Torch', of which he says:

The story I wanted to pick out is 'Compass and Torch' - in the third person, an uncertain boy on a trip with his Dad, whom he doesn't often see. 'The boy is intent. Watching Dad. Watching what Dad is. Drinking it in: the essence of Dadness.' The awkwardness of their relationship - with its latent closeness, and surface of discomfort - is portrayed so exactly. We see it first in relation to the torch, of which the boy is so anxiously proud:

The boy is chattering: 'Have you brought one too, have you brought a torch?'
'Oh, yes!'
Is this a problem? the boy suddenly wonders. Does this make one of the torches redundant? For a brief moment he is uncertain, potentially dismayed, a mood which the man, for all his distraction, catches.
'We can use both of them, can't we, Dad?'

'Oh yes! Yes, of course!'
Then a swoop of delight: 'We can light up more with both, can't we?'
'Oh yes, certainly!' The man too is gratefully caught on a wave of triumph. 'Oh, yes, two are definitely better! Back-up, for a start.'
I shouldn't dream of telling you the end of this story, except that it is done calmly in a couple of sentences, and won't leave your mind for some time.

He reviews it alongside Vanessa Gebbie's wonderful collection, Words from a Glass Bubble, also published by Salt, and which he also loved.

The whole review here.

Fragments from the Dark, edited by Jeni Williams and Latefa Guemar

So I went to Swansea for the launch of Fragments from the Dark, to which I feel privileged to have contributed with one of the stories in my collection and a piece from a novel in progress. It's an anthology of writings about home and exile, edited by Jeni Williams and Latefa Guemar and produced by Hafan (Haven), the Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers support group. The book includes work from professional women writers either born or settled in Wales, such as Carol Rumens, Trezza Azzopardi and Tessa Hadley, and many moving testimonies from women expelled from many different parts of the world and finding themselves in Wales.

A vast crowd crammed into the Dylan Thomas Centre to hear speakers from refugee support groups, readings and music.
In the week when we learn that in our complacent, supposedly 'post-feminist' society Women's Studies are being dropped from some universities and in which, out of a narrow, middle-class perspective, people have called for an end to the Orange Prize as outdated positive discrimination, the point was strongly made here - most clearly by Lynn Hughes from Oxford Cymru - that asylum issues at any rate are women's issues. 'Women do two-thirds of the world's work and make half the world's food and are more likely than men to be involved in community groups', she pointed out, 'yet are less likely to be decision makers... Domestic violence is still the biggest cause of death in women... The asylum system still does not recognise the differing needs of men and women.' Editor Latefa Guemar asked the gathered crowd to take a moment to think of one of their female members who was being held in detention.

Yet if there were solemn and urgent issues running through the evening, there was also a sense of celebration - celebration that people could come together like this and support each other. And then, unbelievably, we were treated to a banquet such as I have never seen before: food prepared by 20 different cooks from 20 different countries.

The large audience:


The woman in blue at the front, who was sitting next to me (and is avidly reading the book), turned out to be Beth Thomas from the Welsh history museum at St Fagans, and who was there on behalf of contributor Elin Ap Hywel (who edited the Honno anthology Power which includes my story 'Power').

Editors Jeni Williams and Latefa Guemar:


Amani Omer Bakhiet Elawad reads the Arabic version of her poem 'I Journey towards You', and Jeni Williams reads the English version (a translation they made together):





The amazing food:


I was very moved (and very full!) by the time John and I left for our hotel which, though slap-bang in the centre of town, was like one of those old-fashioned country hotels with proper wooden wardrobes and antique lamps and breakfast served in the old-fashioned way, and - fittingly, I guess, for the home town of Dylan Thomas - literary novels on the shelves in the lounge.

Next day we nipped off the M4 and called unannounced on my one remaining relative in the village I come from, my Aunt Peggy, who failed to answer the door right away because she thought we were Jehovah's Witnesses.

So, you could say I went home for the launch of a book about home. But so much has changed. When I was little and lived in that village, there was no motorway and Swansea was a very long way away: we were nestled among the trees and cut off from the world, and I'm ashamed to say we sometimes felt invaded when incomers came down for the day from Cardiff to the beach.

Some things change for the worse, but that evening in Swansea, that sense of connection across borders - so beautifully symbolized in the book's cover image of footprints criss-crossing the sand - showed that some things do change for the better.

Sartre, eat your heart out.

We had a secondhand bookshop here in Didsbury - well, it still is a secondhand bookshop (though once it was an ethnic clothes and bit-and-bobs shop run by my friend Judy), but they've now turned the front bit into a little teashop and called it The Art of Tea (though they also serve pretty good coffee) and bake yummy cakes on the premises. Anyway, in spite of what the local paper would have you believe, I've never been a big frequenter of the local cafes, but just recently John and I have been tempted into the Art of Tea, and would you believe it, just as the local paper would have it, it turns out to be a right Mecca of metropolitan arty types. First off this afternoon we discovered poet Phil Davenport working away on his computer, and then when we sat down at a nearby table we discovered among the used cups and plates a discarded draft of someone else's poem - a poem full of food images, perhaps not surprisingly.

I tell you, it's the Left Bank of the Mersey round here...

Reading group: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Trevor suggested this novel which concerns a young married but sexually estranged couple, Port and Kit Morseby, who escape the aftermath of the Second World War by travelling to North Africa and later into the Sahara, only to find themselves divided further.

Trevor said he thought the novel would raise some really interesting issues, but as it happened no one else was fired enough by it to discuss it with much passion. Two people said that they couldn't even finish it, Jenny because she simply found it boring and Ann because, having lived in that area of the world, she found it unrealistic.

Trevor found this hard to believe. He said he thought it was great: didn't we all think it was dead exciting and vivid, for instance, when Port went off on his dangerous sexual adventure at the beginning of the novel? And weren't the larger-than-life mother and son, the Lyles, whom they meet along the way - with the hint of their incest - fascinating? And what about that amazing scene when the dogs are running around in one of the towns with pieces of the body of an abandoned baby?

People seemed a bit nonplussed by Trevor's reaction. Sure, these things were vivid, they said, as were the striking descriptions of the North African towns and the Sahara, but what about the central characters? They just weren't at all likeable and you couldn't care about their story.

I said that you don't need to like the characters to like a novel - though Jenny said she did need to like at least one - but I did agree that you do need to have some emotional investment in their fate. I wondered if the reason we didn't is that although we are treated by the omniscient narrator to very detailed accounts of their feelings and motives, those accounts are very clinical and so those feelings and motives remain at a distance to us.

The book is in three parts and, for reasons I won't reveal here, in part three Kit has an adventure alone, joining a merchant camel train in the desert, and in this part the book undergoes a pretty radical change of style. John said he said he found this third part the best, in fact he really only liked this part, at least things start happening and the pace of the prose hots up - and Trevor quickly agreed. Doug and I cried that we much preferred the first two parts, in fact we hated the last part, not finding it believable in the slightest. Trevor said, But Kit had no choice but to join the caravan, and she had no choice but to succumb to whatever the merchants then demanded of her. I said, that's not the point: I can well imagine in theory that this would be the case, but the novel doesn't convince me, ie the way it's told, and Clare said, You mean the writing, and Trevor said sardonically, Oh, the writing!

I insisted. I said it is the prose in part three which is unconvincing - rushed and staccato. Clare said, but rushed and staccato prose can be appropriate, after all Kit's in a state of turmoil. I said, Yes, it can - for instance I thought the rushed (though fluid) prose replicating Port's typhoid delirium is beautifully done and this is one of the points in the book I find psychologically and emotionally involving - but in part three the prose rhythms and the sentence constructions seem rushed to me in the sense of being unconsidered, even lazy.

John said that what he liked about this last part was that in focussing on Kit it made the book about women and the condition of women, and most of the men agreed. I said that I didn't actually think that this was a specific intention on Bowles' part, as not only are parts one and two more about Port than Kit, I had read in Michael Hofmann's introduction to the new Penguin Classic that when Bowles had got to the end of part two he had decided to use a different writing method for the rest of the book: automatic writing (which eschews thought or conscious 'art') - which would also explain not only the change in style but the nature of the prose here.

In other words, I felt that by loosening the reins of his artistic consciousness, Bowles had merely reproduced here an unconvincing male fantasy about a woman, a fact which showed up in the prose.

At which Trevor insisted once more that this was how Kit would have behaved.

Ann said that she wasn't even convinced by Kit's behaviour in the first two parts, which was why she had stopped reading before then. Also, she had found the book unremittingly colonial in its perspective, and that it colluded too far with Port's racist view of Arabs as 'monkeys'. (How on earth could they have made a film out of it at that rate? I asked, and Clare, who had seen the film, said that they had excised all the racism and romanticised it all, especially part three, and indeed bleached it of the real theme - the emotional and existential barrenness of the characters - so that in fact it had been like watching paint dry.) Some people quibbled with Ann's point, saying that there were some sympathetic Arabs in the book, that the author is not necessarily to be identified with Port, and that even Port despises the anti-semitism of the Lyles. But as Ann said, the perspective of no Arab is ever represented (although she guessed that was par for the course at the time of the novel's writing), and it's all relative.

And then Trevor said how much he'd enjoyed the exciting bit towards the end and Kit's imprisonment and escape, and explained to us doubters why she would have acted exactly as she did.


Next time, we're discussing Ann's choice, The Hours by Michael Cunningham - by the skin of our teeth, as Jenny said that she didn't like novels with parallel narratives.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Getting into the zone

I've been writing really slowly, which is unusual for me. Partly I think it's because I'm trying something new - a new way of writing stories for me - and I'm feeling my way with it, but it's also because I've been pretty distracted by family illness.

Every now and then I read something, usually on the web, which implies that writers have no business letting themselves get distracted, that it's just too precious, for writing is a job of work, and writer's block is nothing but a pretentious excuse for something much more down-to-earth: simply getting stuck.

Well, I've given out plenty of advice in my time for dealing with this last but, you know, sometimes it really isn't just a matter of practicalities. As far as I'm concerned, in order to write you really do need a particular psychic state - emotionally different for each thing you write, but always a separate space from that which you inhabit day-to-day. It's as the athletes and sports people say: you need to get 'in the zone'. It's a kind of dream-like state, a kind of trance - indeed, John has sometimes come into my room when I'm writing and touched me on the shoulder and I haven't even noticed. And it's hard to get into it when there are other things on your mind like your brother's chemo or your partner's hospital tests.

As fellow Salt author Carys Davies has said to me, writing time needs to be 'pure'.

Well, maybe it doesn't for some people. Maybe they are better than me and Carys at cutting off and getting into the zone whatever's going on. But then if you can't do it so easily, aren't you disadvantaged or disabled? And no one wants to condemn the disabled for their disability, do they?

Some New Ambush by Carys Davies long-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2008

Last time I decided to go to Welsh Academy's Wrexham Library launch of the long list for the Wales Book of the Year Award, it was called off at the last minute due to snow, and yesterday I thought I might not make again it because of the gales, but luckily the winds died down during the afternoon. I especially wanted to go this time because I had an exciting hunch that my fellow Salt author, Carys Davies, was on the long list (I'm psychic, right? No, actually, I just picked up some clues and put them together) and sure enough she had, and had made it there too (in a roundabout way, due to the closure of the Thelwall viaduct)!

The three judges for the English Language prize were represented at Wrexham by writer and broadcaster Mavis Nicholson. Introducing their long list, she said that they'd had 200 books to consider (which is more than the Booker judges have to contend with). Like former Booker judges who have commented recently, she said that with such a large number the job was very onerous, and constantly going from one book to a very different other made it difficult to be sure to give each book the right kind of attention. She suggested, therefore, that in future, particularly in view of the fact that so many of the books had been 'fluffy', the organizers operated some kind of filtering system before handing over to the judges. She said also that the judges had been very struck by the poor editing of books nowadays and that it was very clear that many books are now hardly edited at all.

Then she announced the ten long-listed books, five of which come from small presses:

Winterton Blue - Trezza Azzopardi (Picador)
Hector's Talent - Kitti Harri (Honno)
Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth - (Bloomsbury)
The Claude Glass - Tom Bullough (Sort Of Books)
Blue Sky July - Nia Wyn (Seren)
Trouble in Heaven (Gomer)
Some New Ambush - Carys Davies (Salt)
The Presence - Dannie Abse (Hutchinson)
The Master Bedroom - Tessa Hadley (Cape)

Congratulations to all of them and especially (since I know her) to Carys!

Mavis Nicholson happened to be leaving for the car park at the same time as John and me. She said her husband would be turning in his grave if he thought she'd judged a competition, since he didn't believe in them. I said, Well, I don't really, and I told her that I'm always going on about it on my other blog, but then when someone you know wins one, well you can't help but be very pleased indeed!

Launch of Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

Really great time last night at the launch of Vanessa Gebbie's collection of short stories from Salt, Words from a Glass Bubble. John and I arrived completely windswept to find ourselves in the most beautiful surroundings in London's Foundling Museum, champagne being poured and Vanessa resplendent at a table piled high with her beautifully produced book and people already queueing to have copies signed. Periodically throughout the evening Vanessa read instalments of her wry and touching title story, which was a nice way to do it. And three of us turned out to be wearing almost identical costumes, me, Vanessa and the gent in the oil painting below which she read. And then, all too soon it was time to rush off through the wind again to Euston and to spend the journey immersed in those stories, heartbreaking yet witty, gritty yet other-worldly and totally original - so that we got to Stockport before I realized and had to make a scramble for the door.


People queueing:




Me and Jen from Salt having a natter:


and sporting our fabulous Salt bags:

Salt wins Nielsen Innovation of the Year Award

I am thrilled to be able to announce that my fabulous publisher Salt has won the Neilsen Innovation of the Year Award at the Independents Publishers Awards

'...for its imaginative efforts to increase sales of collections of poetry and short stories despite very challenging market conditions. It impressed with its range of web-based marketing initiatives and partnerships and energetic development of its brand.'

Publisher and fiction editor Jen Hamilton Emery (pictured with publisher and poetry editor Chris Hamilton-Emery) says:

it's great to win an award that matters to us, and especially one which signifies that the literary sector is able to drive sales and get noticed on a national scale.

Hanif Kureishi at Manchester University

On Thursday night Hanif Kureishi read and talked to a sold-out theatre at Manchester University. Kureishi turned out to be a frank yet even-handed speaker and said what seemed to me eminently sensible things about writing. Yes, he thought intuition was a big part of writing but then you always had to have a rational understanding as to why you were following your intuitions. Yes, he thought (like me) that the distinction between autobiographical and non-autobiographical writing was a dubious one. Yes, he thought you developed as a writer as you got older, you learnt more skills but you can lose some of the fire of untutored youth. Yes, he had swapped about from form to form but he wouldn't say he liked any of them better than the others, films were good for making money and for getting away from the isolation of the desk, prose gave you more or less total creative control. Novels are great to get your teeth into but also hard work and short stories can come as light relief when you've finished one. Did he like working with actors? Well, if we thought writers were a pain we should meet some actors, they were awful, but then on the other hand he's been really grateful to the actors he's worked with, they can give an underwritten part wonderful life.

The narrator of his latest novel, Something to Tell You, is a psychoanalyst, and writing as therapy was a strong thread through the evening. The way he told it, he himself took up writing as the best form of therapy, but then on the other hand, as he always tells his creative writing students, you've always got to be aware of the reader and write for the reader. I'm not sure how the Creative Writing students in the audience must have reacted when, asked whether he agreed with Will Self's condemnation of the teaching of Creative Writing, Kureishi said that he could see where Self was coming from, there really was something dodgy about it all: what the universities are up to in fact is making money out of the fees, and it would be an utter cruelty to give 'these people' the impression they were likely to get a publishing deal, the point of it all for most of them was therapy (which of course is important), and some of them in fact were 'absolutely barking' - in fact he's noticed that when you get these shootings in American universities the perpetrators always turn out to be students of Creative Writing. But then after all it's true that madness is close to genius and all great writers really have to be mad - at which point the audience laughter turned from nervous to relieved.

It was an extra nice evening for me, as while I was waiting for the reading to begin, I looked up at the woman who was sitting down beside me and realized it was my friend, writer and counsellor Brenda Mallon whom I hadn't seen for ages. One of the many books Brenda has written is Women Dreaming, and afterwards she asked Kureishi how much he used his dreams in his writing, and he answered: 'All the time.'

Where do you get your inspiration? or The distraction of literature

Yesterday I went to have my hair cut.

I've been wanting a change but I've been having trouble getting my hairdresser to make it.

Me: Well, last time you did agree I should have a few layers at the front, but actually you didn't do it in the end.

My hairdresser: Oh yes, yes, that's what we'll do!

He starts snipping. He says, So what have you been up to? and I tell him, I'm doing a new series of short stories. What about? he wants to know. I tell him about the one I'm writing now set on a train. I tell him about the ones I've already finished, the one about the airport, and the one about driving too fast on the motorway, and one about getting lost with a map, and the one I'm going to write about a robbery.

He snips thoughtfully. He says, I guess you can write a story about anything!

I agree that you can.

I say: Oh. Don't you think I could have some shorter layers than that?

Oh, yes, yes, sure! he says, and gets snipping at the front.

He's thoughtful again. He looks up excitedly, scissors poised. He says: You could write one about a hairdresser! Shenanigans in the salon!

I say I could! Go on then, give me some material!

He says quickly: Or you could make him a mobile hairdresser! All those things he could get up to in women's houses!

And then we talk about the earthquake and other things. He goes quiet. He says: Or the salon. All those things he could get up to in the salon!

I say, Yes, right! Give!

He laughs. No, no I'm not telling you anything!

He says he's done.

What happened to the shorter layers? I say.

Adele Geras reviews two Salt story collections including Balancing

Adele Geras contributes to Normblog today with a post in defence of the short story and includes very nice reviews of Balancing on the Edge of the World and another Salt book, Words from a Glass Bubble by fellow-blogger Vanessa Gebbie, which will be published next week and which I must say Adele makes sound wonderful.

Selling short stories

Recently I noted how unusual (and good) it was that Faber have promoted as a virtue the varied nature of the stories in Clare Wigfall's collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing, and BookFox has commented similarly on the promotion of John Shepard's prizewinning collection Like You'd Understand Anyway.

BookFox now alerts us to an interesting essay by publisher Gina Frangello, replicated on The Literary Outpost, a section of which deals with the reasons why for so long now the typical published short story collection has been interconnected facets of a unified whole (or indeed an episodic novel):

Often, when I presented at panels, writers in the audience asked why short fiction had met with such a decline in popularity. After all, many reasoned, if the contemporary attention span has become geared towards sitcoms and videogames, then aren’t short stories the ideal medium for the hip young reader? The answer, I often suspected, had nothing to do with what the contemporary reader would actually read, and much more to do with what marketing departments could successfully tell them to read. While a novel can be easily marketed with a few plot-summarizing taglines (and a memoir even more so, especially if its author is famous and his/her life already well-documented in the tabloids), it is much harder to “sell” a collection of 10 or so diverse stories with no common characters or plots.

As I think I have said here before, when my own collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was in production I nearly died when we had to start thinking of a single unifying characteristic for marketing purposes, since my aesthetic purpose in writing the stories had been to make each one unique. I had approached each story as a whole new adventure: a new idea which required its own unique way of telling (so that you won't even find a unity through the book in the way the dialogue is punctuated, as each story required its own particular mode). But of course, since they had all been written by me with my continuing obsessions, I was able to choose fourteen stories which linked thematically, and there are other links - in subject matter and in style - criss-crossing the collection.

Shepard's publishers have no qualms, though: here's the brave or foolish but undoubtedly exhilarating blurb on his book (thanks to BookFox): "So varied in tone, theme, voice, and setting are these stories that they might've been written by a hydra."

The necessary evil of research

How I hate research. I mean I like it in itself but oh how I hate what it does to the writing process. I've just spent most of this morning on the internet turning into a train nerd and researching how modern trains work - all for one small section of the short story I'm writing. And I found out what I needed to and was armed to carry on with the story - and I couldn't! Because of course you need a different kind of thinking: you need to let the research sink back away into your less conscious brain, and wait for the story to reassert itself with the new information attached in the ways that suit it best.

Grr. May as well give up and go and get lunch.

Letting writers be who they are

Playwright Dennis Kelly complains in today's Guardian about the way that writers must be pigeonholed, expected to write the same thing over and over and assumed to be unable to move from one genre to another. People can't come to terms, he says, with the fact that he writes both serious theatre and comedy for TV.

I know exactly what he means. At the playwrights' Christmas get-together, where all the old Theatre Writers' Union members but me were now or had been Emmerdale writers, I was asked why I had never written for TV. Good question. Once a very well known TV playwright, who is known also for generously helping other writers, put my name forward to a TV drama executive. Well, you can't imagine a better leg-up than that, can you? But guess what, it got me nowhere: my track record of prizewinning radio plays and literary prose fiction (about which the drama exec was very complimentary) were just not the right qualifications for an aspiring TV playwright - quite the opposite, I suspect.

Kelly's comments also apply to the system of 'writer development' in most of our new-writing theatres, which I've written about before, and of course, while Kelly is writing about playwrights, the same applies for writers of books.

'...it's time we let new writers be who they want to be, without forcing them to make artificial decisions about who they are and what they should write.'

My favourite bookshops of the week: Deansgate Waterstone's and Borders Cambridge

I have fallen back in love with Deansgate Waterstone's - partly for selfish reasons. Here's the photo I took yesterday of my book on display there along with books by two other Salt authors, David Gaffney and Neil Campbell:


I had read in Joel Rickett's Guardian bookseller column that Waterstone's was having a change of heart re authors and was about to begin a nationwide local authors promotion. Deansgate are certainly doing that: our books are part of a floor-to-ceiling local interest display right next to the main door. And as for books generally, I noticed that there's now a box for customer suggestions. Things are looking up again, hooray.

And while I'm at it, here's a photo of my book on a shelf in Borders Cambridge, sent to me by Jen of Salt.


Let's see, how can I put this? If any other bookshops want to send me photos of my book on their shelves, I'll be more than happy to give them some publicity in return!

The importance of buses

Funny that I should come across this the day after writing a post about getting inspired on the bus (it's a quote from Paul Bowles in the introduction to the Penguin edition of his novel The Sheltering Sky, which we are reading for our next reading group discussion):

I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown to Tenth Street. I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient.

Which is also, more or less, the decision I made about viewpoint for my story (or rather the inspiration I had). Must be something about the perspective you get on a bus...

Writing away from the desk

I'm pretty rubbish, really, at following my own advice. If you read my chapter in the Macmillan Palgrave Creative Writing Handbook you'll see that I suggest that if you're stuck when you're writing it's sometimes best just to give up and go and do something else.

Yes, well. I'm working on a new series of short stories - rather different from any I've written before - and today I intended to start on a new one. But I just couldn't find the way into it: I had the situation, I knew the theme (or as much of it as I need to at this stage), the story was already peopled in my mind, but I didn't have the essential thing: the mode of telling, and the voice.

The way I think of this is that I couldn't hear it. I sat at my desk all morning listening for it, the voice of the story, while in the distance, above the roofs opposite, planes came in one after the other towards the airport, right on each other's tails, and I never stopped seeing them because I never heard it and never started writing. Well, I wrote a few first sentences, but every one was wrong, fake, 'made up', not setting me off in the right direction or encapsulating the feel and essence of the story I want to write. (And screwed the pages up and binned them because as always I have to obliterate those wrong starts, get the wrong noise out of my head - one of my biggest ecological sins in life!)

And then it got to 11.45 and it was time to get dressed if I was going to make it to a lunchtime poetry reading at Central Library - Ian Pople and Chris Woods - as I had planned. But how could I leave my desk when I hadn't even started? I really ought to stay and crack that story.

I nearly didn't go. But in the end I did and, late because of my prevarication, I dashed into the shower and rushed to the bus stop, and the story went right out of my mind. Until I was sitting down on the bus and suddenly the voice of the story and the first sentence dropped as if from nowhere into my head!

The reading was extremely successful: Central Library Reading Room was crammed - standing room only - to hear the vivid poems which have emerged from Ian Pople's travels and the insights which Chris Woods' profession as a doctor have lent to his. In fact, I've been having a poetic couple of days: last night, due to illness Gwyneth Lewis failed to make it to Manchester to give MMU's first reading of the semester, and Michael Simmons Roberts and John McAuliff stood in at the last moment to give great readings, Michael treating us to a series of great new poems yet unpublished. I knew a lot of John's poems, but the great thing about good poems is that they get better each time you hear or read them.

On the way back from Central Library I called in at Blackwell's to see if they'd consider stocking my book, Balancing on the Edge of the World, but it turned out the person I had to see isn't there on Fridays, so that was a failure. Still, at least I got going on my story today, and reminded myself that the best writing is not always done at the desk.

Reading group: Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov

It seems to be generally agreed in our reading group that Lolita is the best novel we have discussed, so when John suggested another Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, everyone jumped on it.

This book, written some twenty-three years earlier, follows the same Nabokovian scenario, with differences: that of a middle-aged man caught in a doomed passion for a childlike young woman. Originally written in Russian with the title Kamera Obskura and soon after translated into English as Camera Obscura, it was eventually retranslated by Nabokov himself - and, I understand, to some extent revised - and republished as Laughter in the Dark.

The bones of the story are set out at the beginning of Laughter in the Dark:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and though there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.

Thus it is established that what will be of interest is not the what of this story but the how, and what follows is an omniscient-author view (not unlike the encapsulated panoramic view through a camera obscura) of the circumstances, coincidences and manipulations - all masterfully handled - through which Albert Albinus is ruined at the hands of the gold-digging prostitute Margot and her diabolical lover, Axel Rex.

The theme of the novel is clearly that of insight, conveyed through images of darkness and brilliant light. Albinus is sadly lacking in moral insight and, symbolically, falls in love with the unsuitable Margot in the dark of a cinema and eventually is blinded.

Most people had enjoyed the book immensely, but Doug surprised us all by disagreeing. He said he found it impossible to care about the fate of any of the characters, and found it quite unconvincing that Albinus should leave his wife for Margot. There followed a long discussion about this last: people said, Well it was passion, irrational passion! But Doug said that was precisely what he didn't get any sense of with the stuffy Albinus.

It is true that most people had been surprised, after the psychological complexity of Lolita, that the characters in this book are indeed stereotypes. The book has a cartoon quality, as colourfully vivid indeed as a camera obscura image, and to a great extent relies on farce. It is therefore is only by accepting these terms, and indeed entering into Nabokov's contract and taking pleasure in the process of narrative (rather than expecting psychological complexity or expecting to identify with the characters) that one can fully enjoy this book.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

A Glossary of Bread in Buran

'A Glossary of Bread,' one of the stories in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World, appears in the current issue of the online Italian literary mag, Buran, which has gone online today. It's a very international issue based on the theme of Food. Another author in the issue is Tamar Yellin, with a translated extract of her prize-winning novel The Genizah at the House of Shepher. So if you can read Italian.... I can't very well, but this mag looks so good I'm guessing it will be a pretty good translation.

Reading: Clare Wigfall and Jonathan Trigell

After the Christmas break and I presume the exam season, readings at Manchester's two universities are finally getting going again, in a stumbling sort of way. The reading programmes at both schools of writing are notably sparser than previously, I presume as a result of funding cuts, or funding used in other ways.

On Monday the Victoria University hosted two of its own creative writing alumni - my Myspace friend Clare Wigfall, who took the creative writing option for her BA at Manchester, and Jonathan Trigell, who did the Novel-Writing MA. It was a smashing reading: Jonathan, whose first novel, Boy A, which was written for the course and has since done so well it's been a TV film, was a fizzy and engaging reader, and as well as reading from his two novels he treated us to a short story (previously broadcast on Radio 3) which was so very accomplished that it was hard believe what he told us: that it was the only one he had ever written. Sometimes writers are just born, you can't get away from that...

And as for Clare: well, I somehow knew I was going to like her stories - I had already seen one somewhere - but in fact I was bowled over by their haunting, glancing nature, and their verbal precision (as well as by her amazingly gifted reading). One thing I found really interesting: there's been a long period in which there's been a fashion for publishing linked short stories (short stories trying to ape novels, and indeed pretend that they're not really short stories at all, in a climate where they're supposed to be unpopular). But the short stories in Clare's collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing are vastly varied in subject matter, tone and voice, which Faber are rightly pushing as a virtue, and a sign of her acrobatic gifts as a short-story writer. For the best short stories, like the best poems, exist alone and resonate so far that they have no need of being shored up by others on all sides...

Sarfraz Manzoor at Central Library

To Manchester Central Library last night to hear Guardian journalist and documentary maker Sarfraz Manzoor talking about and reading from his memoir of growing up in seventies and eighties Luton, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock and Roll.

Manzoor is an engagingly honest speaker. He told us that he had written the book as a celebration of ordinariness, something he hadn't found in the biographies he's read as a schoolboy, which had made him feel excluded. He told us how he'd got published: a big literary agency, noting his writing in the Guardian, had written and asked him if he'd like to write a book.

Looking round the audience, many of whom had read his book beforehand, I saw row upon row of fondly smiling faces, but then some joker - whom I think knew Manzoor personally - pricked the bubble somewhat satirically and tipped the evening into laughter. But how could Manzoor call himself ordinary? he asked: Wasn't that why his book was published, for the very reason that he isn't ordinary now? And how, therefore, the speaker seemed to be implying, could his book be read as being about the ordinary, after all?

One of those conundrums which autobiographical writers know only too well.

The Short Review Issue 4

Issue 4 of Tania Hershman's Short Review is now up.

Not just out but away

So off John and I went to London on Monday and, as we'd
promised ourselves, we went out to the Troubadour in the
evening to the Salt poetry reading. Well, I'd never been to
the Troubadour before, and what an amazingly atmospheric
place it is: that lovely old exterior, and beyond the door a
candlelit bar (at least that's how I remember it) and then
down the stairs to the darkened basement where it seems
Dylan and Hendrix performed in the sixties - already
crammed, and we were lucky to get a seat. And then there
were the Salt poets, standing in turn under a spotlight like a
golden sun (see the slideshow below) and transporting us
with rhythm, with wisdom, with longing, with laughter,
and above all with magical fizzing words.

Dovegreyreader's review of Balancing on the Edge of the World

Dovegreyreader, that miracle of a woman who manages to read more than just about anybody while quilting, knitting and driving across the countryside as a community nurse (I don't think all at the same time!), and yet gives her reading the most thoughtful attention, has written a lovely review of Balancing on the Edge of the World. Needless to say, I am over the moon as the footballers say!

Going out once more

I had to laugh last week when I read an article by Linda Grant about the shoddiness of some so-called designer clothes - laugh at myself, that is.

She begins the article by saying that she'd had to bin two Zara little black dresses which hadn't lasted two years, too shabby now even for a charity shop. I thought: Two LBDs from Zara?!!! When would a writer like me buy even one LBD from Zara, let alone two? When would a writer like me ever wear an LBD? Once in a blue moon maybe for a prizegiving - and other people's rather than my own, because at my own I'd rather be taken seriously as a writer, not a fashion victim (but there I am, see, obsessed with image anyway) - so when it comes to LBDs (along with most kinds of clothes, I have to admit) it's charity-shop jobs for me. (Which is why, perhaps, when I went as a guest of winner Carl Tighe to the Authors' Club first book award, an amazingly beautiful ice queen in an absolutely up-to-the-minute LBD didn't half give me the snooty once-over in the loo.)

But maybe my reaction to Grant's article was coloured by the fact that I've spent January more or less in my pyjamas, lost in the new series of short stories I've just embarked on and hardly going out - though I seem to be making up for this last at the moment.

You've got to work on your publicity, right? And on Friday I went into town through the wind and snow - my god, it's cold out there in the big wide world! - to Manchester Digital Development Agency, where Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher was putting into practice an idea he found in that bottle of red wine we had at our post-Christmas drink, and which included filming a 'Meet the Author' type clip of me. I'll put it up on this blog if I turn out not to be too absolutely dreadful - see, there I am again, on about image; or maybe I'm just being sensible: a dreadful image is not going sell any books, or so they say. (How do you know, for instance, that there aren't fangs and carbuncles Photoshopped out of my profile photo?)

And then yesterday I spent the whole day in town at the initial sifting of scripts for the 24:7 Theatre Festival (snow on the ground!). I couldn't imagine how Amanda (Hennessey) and David (Slack) were going to organize it, but it worked like a dream and involved us reading aloud a substantial portion of each play, which, since most of the readers were actors as well as writers and/or directors, ensured that the readings justified the plays as far as possible (you know actors, they have an inbuilt instinct to try and realize characters as well as possible). What a marathon, though! We were so hoarse by the end of it! But it was so enjoyable, and I have to say I was stunned by the general high standard and inventiveness of some of the plays I saw - which means it's going to be a cracking festival come July.

And tomorrow I'm off to London for the day, and in the evening I'll be going to the Salt poetry reading at the Troubadour Cafe, 265 Old Brompton Road, 8.00pm - 10pm. Ten Salt poets reading: I'm really looking forward to it - those Salt poets are fantastic, and the Salt readings are great.