The White Review Prize
04/04/2014
Now in its second year, The White Review Prize was ‘founded to reward ambitious, imaginative and innovative approaches to creative writing’. I am delighted to have made the shortlist with my piece ‘Spins’ alongside writers whose work I have long admired: please follow the links to read the brilliant ‘MUEUM’ by SJ Fowler, ‘Lives of the Saints’ by Luke Neima, ‘Submission for the Journal of Improbable Interventions’ by Brenda Parker, ‘by Accident’ by David Isaacs, ‘Biophile’ by Ruby Cowling, ‘Obsolescence’ by Joseph Mackertich and ‘Chiral’ by Paul Currion.
My piece can be read here.
Chocolate Factory
04/04/2014
Author David Gaffney and I were invited to read for Haringey Literature Live, a monthly series MC’d by Ambit‘s Kate Pemberton. Focussing upon short fiction, the evening was held at the Chocolate Factory, an art, design, music and media studio-complex in Wood Green’s Cultural Quarter.
Thanks to Kate and to the warm audience. You can buy copies of David’s Sawn-Off Tales through Salt’s online store.
Re:Est 2014
29/03/2014
I owe C4CC a lot, both acoustically and for hosting increasingly inventive ways by which wine is dropped somewhere between my trouser-ends and white tiling. ALSO! on the 29th March, the former station building staged a number of readings and performances for Runnymede International Literary Festival 2014. The day featured students from the MA in Poetic Practice at RHUL including Carrie Foulkes, Sophia Fratianne, Christian Groves, Kaori Maeda, and Heather Remington. Audiences were treated to work by Rod Mengham, Ben Hickman and Holly Pester. Please read the word of Frances Kruk; you’ll thank me. Please look out for the work of Aimee Le; you’ll see why. Please read the work of Marcus Slease, Robert Sheppard, Rob Holloway and Peter Hughes.
At the end of useful hours, there were readings by PhD students Robert Selby, Aviva Dautch, Kate Potts, Karen McCarthy-Woolf, Nisha Ramayya, Dominic McLoughlin, Ishita Mandrekar, Declan Ryan and me. Many thanks to Frances Kruk, Robert Hampson and Declan for organising the day.
And on the Thousandth Night, Exeunt Omnes
22/03/2014
Illustrated by C Williams
http://catherinewilliams.weebly.com/
On the 22nd March, acclaimed collaborative performance company Forced Entertainment staged their work And on the Thousandth Night as part of Artist of the City 2014 in Lisbon. This is a six hour durational piece:
A story is told, made up live, dragged from memory by a line of eight performers dressed as Kings and Queens, wearing cheap red cloaks and cardboard crowns. It is a long, mutating and endlessly self-cancelling story. It is a story which somehow, in its many dips and turns, seems to include many — if not all — of the stories in the world. Moving from the extraordinary to the banal, it mixes everything from film plots, religious stories, children’s stories, traditional tales, jokes and modern myths, to scary stories, love stories and sex stories.
The Kings and Queens compete, interrupting, exaggerating, taking over each other’s narratives and incorporating stolen bits into their own tales. Their storytelling moves between tiredness and hysteria, between absurd vulgarity and surprising tenderness. At times, some of the Kings and Queens take a break to sleep on the floor at the back of the space whilst their colleagues continue. At ten at night, perhaps, there are only two Kings left speaking, pushing on the tale, as one by one, the others come forward to rejoin the line.
Photo by Hugo Glendinning
http://www.hugoglendinning.com
To document the performance, I was invited to participate in a corresponding multi-authored, durational critical writing project hosted by Exeunt Magazine. The writers were stationed in London, Melbourne and Berlin with a brief to respond to the performance’s live-stream provided by the British Council; our texts were contributed in real-time as the piece played. The critical co/(r)/respondents featured the brilliant Jana Perkovic, Deborah Pearson, Anette Therese Pettersen, Bojana Jankovic, Daniel B. Yates and curator Diana Damian Martin, all of whom took ‘questions of duration, text, narrative, performance, error, invention, failure and time itself, alongside those of distance, attention, fragmentation and being together, digitally’ into consideration.
The project can be found here, in reverse order, and an artist’s live sketches of the event were produced by Århus’ Catherine Williams for Generative Constraints journal; please click the drawn images for more information.
The Poetry of Lexicography
20/01/2014
With the house’s curator, I’ve organised a poetry evening for 23rd January 2013 to be held in the former home of Dr. Samuel Johnson. With pieces exploring the strictures, structures and authority of lexicons both real and imagined, come along and hear new work dedicated to the celebration of Johnson’s ‘harmless drudgery’ by Kate Potts, Nisha Ramayya and Prue Chamberlain. The evening will be hosted in the garret, where Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary was compiled.
We will be joined by Giles Goodland, lexicographer and winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, alongside John McCullough whose debut collection The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) was awarded the Polari First Book Prize.
Tickets for the evening include a glass of wine served in the Withdrawing Room – doors open at 6.15pm.
For more information about Dr. Johnson’s house: http://www.drjohnsonshouse.
Interrobang & Upward Inflections
28/11/2013
Annexe Magazine held its second Interrobang Festival last Saturday, hosting music, comedy, book-making workshops and readings from Inua Ellams, Akiho Schilz and Claire Trévien. I was there trialling some new work in the afternoon alongside James Brookes, Nick Murray and Gary from Leeds, co-editor of The Alarmist: ‘eavens to Betsy. The festival was also holding a book fair in the Free Word Centre next door, allowing space for a number of independent and small press publishers including Penned in the Margins, Emma Press, Belle Park Pages and Influx: a good way to fling your pay packet directly at 30sq metres of Farringdon. Many thanks to Nick, Alex and Hannah for their behind-the-scenesing, and for a warm audience.
Generative Constraints
21/11/2013
Hosted by Royal Holloway University of London, the Generative Constraints practice-based conference was held on 16th November at C4CC. Saturday saw fantastic papers, performances, exhibitions and addresses from Prof. Jane Rendell, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, Amanda Beech, Bryan Eccleshall, Eleanor Rees, Sotirios Varsamis, Richard Barrett, Sarah Cole, Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards, Madeleine Walton, Heather Pennington, Daniel Oliver and Mr Ferris, Gareth Damian Martin, Rachel Smith, Ron Herrema, Steph Driver, Tom Jenks, Laura Burns, Johanna Linsley and R. Justin Hunt, Pema Clark, Deborah Pearson, Andrew Johnson, Annabel Frearson, Annie Runkel, Georgie Grace, Ghazal Mosadeq, Katy Connor and Mark Peter Wright. A long list that’s testament to a full day of text, art, music, restraint and a programme of big-thought much-make.
With thanks to Kingston University for their select financial assistance; if you are interested in practice-based studies and its outcomeliness, do follow the work of their research unit.
Thanks too Dr. Kristen Kreider and Jane Gawthrope for their assistance and encouragement, and congratulations to the committee of bustaguts comprising Deborah Pearson, Jayne Lloyd, Kate Potts, Nik Wakefield, Prue Chamberlain, Diana Damien Martin and Nisha Ramayya: find a Big Top and let any one of them lead the ring. Follow the (dedicated) Publication and visit the (dedicated) Gallery to keep abreast of all aspects explored during the conference. Thanks again to all involved.
Reading with Liza Klaussman
11/11/2013
Susan Gray, Emma Venables, Ishita Mandrekar and I are hosting an evening with Picador author and member-of-my-Creating-Writing-MA-year Liza Klaussmann.
“With sultry prose and a sure hand for suspense, Liza Klaussmann expertly weaves a vivid tale of glamour and despair, fidelity and betrayal, secrets and abandon. Tigers in Red Weather will have you furiously postponing all human interaction until its gripping finale.” — Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Whenever I had to scramble across London to get to RHUL’s campus on Egham, for a good four months I passed this advertisement. Motivational visual aid right there. Many thanks to Liza for her time, and to my fellow readers.
Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef
07/11/2013
Listed as one of Foyles’ Magazines of the Week, I have a short story in Belleville Park Pages No. 10. Pocketsized and Paris-wrought, you can scoop yours up with a bumper wee fold-out work ‘Halves’ by Sophie Haigney for a mere £2. Here are both, modelled first by a good-looking man:
and second by my sister who picked up a copy in situ at Shakespeare & Company bookshop LIKE A CHAMPION.
Written & Composed
02/11/2013
On the first of the month I performed two pieces as part of ‘Written & Composed’, a showcase event with members of Royal Holloway’s creative writing and composition departments.
It featured fiction readings and literary/musical pieces commissioned for the evening. My two collaborations were with composer Zoi Dachri and an Oulipan skit with Ishita Mandrekar. It was a great evening, with thanks to Susan Gray, Lucy Harrison, Leda Kalogeropoulou, Ishita and Zoi, Preti Taneja, Emma Venables and Tom Wilson for their work and for pulling the evening together.