A blurring of poetry and prose

I read a few pieces of flash fiction in the pub last night and they seemed to go down well. I don't mean I had one too many shandies and jumped on a table with a sheaf of paper in my hand, this was an event I'd jointly organised on behalf of Ilkley Writers, with the Wharfedale Poets. Between us we've got a clutch of published writers (of novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction), and the talent on show reflected that. A reasonable audience turned out on a Sunday night for us, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. We had poetry from Tony Barringer, Jenny Dixon, Yvette Huddleston, Colin Speakman, Mike Farren, Dave Hesmondhalgh and Fiona Williams, with prose from Mandy Sutter (a Wharfedale Poet with a short story collection out soon), Emily Devane, Fleur Speakman, Rachel Hagan, Andrea Hardaker, and me. I re-used the fab performance book I made a couple of years ago, which is ok as long as I don't turn over two pages and start reading a story from some previous event.

Afterwards, I ended up talking to a couple of the poets about the blurred boundary between flash fiction and less structured poetry. I'm not keen on labels, as a rule - I just write stuff and see what happens. Admittedly I have trouble finding where to submit some of it...

I have, however, submitted a story inspired by John Mayall's Blues Breakers album with Eric Clapton to The RS500, where they're slowly releasing writing inspired by each of Rolling Stone's top 500 albums, and it's due out this week. I'll put the link here when it's available.