Week 15: Spoken word in Leeds, among other things
The highlight of this week was Friday night at Anything Prose, the occasional poetry-free offshoot of regular open mic night Word Club at the Chemic Tavern in Leeds. Hosted by Mark Connors, the stand-out performances for me were from headliners Lynn Bauman-Milner and David Williams.
Lynn was introduced as a horror writer and my heart sank, but although one of her stories veered into gory territory, it was so well-written that I barely noticed. The others were unsettling, chilling, darkly wonderful and not what I think of when I think of horror. Maybe I assume horror covers plausible events in the real world, featuring scary evil humans, whereas I'm fine with dark fantasy involving strange creatures and other worlds. Impressively there were T-shirts for sale as well as books. I should have checked the back to see if it had a list of open mic nights and library readings she's done, in the vein of a band tour T-shirt, but I didn't.
David read a scene from his thriller 11.59, and as well as brilliantly conjuring up the setting (a down at heel pub, largely populated by steady drinkers) he made me interested in the main character, a late-night talk radio DJ, in a relatively short time. As David Williams seems to write in many formats it was perhaps unsurprising that he's made a foray into Twitter fiction, with a book collecting 1000 story tweets. He was one of three people during the evening to read some of their Twitter fiction and though I like it (I had my first Twitter fiction published in 2009, long before I was on Twitter) and there were some great examples on Friday night, I find it a bitty experience at an open mic. Reading one or two straight after each other is fine, but a succession interspersed with titles and comments seems to break the flow too much for my liking.
Naturally, I read a piece of flash fiction myself, a response to Hemingway's famous baby shoes six-worder, featuring mermaids. I was halfway down the half of real ale before I considered it might be detrimental to my performance of a couple of tricky lines, but it seemed to go off OK and I'm looking forward to going to Anything Prose again sometime.
Other events this week included a free webinar on how to blog more effectively (which I'm clearly following to the letter. Er...) and a Twitter fiction competition which was only open to staff, students, and alumni of Edinburgh University, to launch a new journal. First time I've used that maths degree in ages. I've sent two sketches to Newsjack this week, breaking out of my one-liner comfort zone to write a Yes Minister pastiche and a sketch about Donald Trump (swore I wouldn't, but he's proving too tempting). And tonight it's the penultimate meeting at Chapel FM before this year's Writing on Air festival. Excuse me while I put my feet up for ten minutes.