Short but sweet

Well, I don't wish to depress anyone, but tomorrow is May. How the devil did that happen? Ho hum, let's think less about how closer we are to pureed food and non-stop TV and rather focus on the fact that the days are getting longer and the nights shorter... as is our fiction, apparently. The Huffington Post today features a piece on International Short Story Month, which kicks off in the morning; the UK's very own National Flash-Fiction Day, meanwhile, is chalked up for 22 June, kind of but not quite the longest day (and therefore shortest night - geddit?).

So I thought I'd take the opportunity to do some blatant self-promotion, cos what would be the point of running a blog if you couldn't say what the hell you wanted on it? First off, the FlashTag writing collective spent yesterday evening eating pizza and drinking lager and, because I'm a lady, white wine, and arguing about the 70 entries we received for our latest competition. The shortlist will be announced very soon then the winners will be revealed live at the Nook & Cranny on Wednesday 22 May, 7pm, as part of Chorlton Arts Festival. The shortlisted writers will all read their pieces, the FlashTag gang will read some of their own stuff, and we'll have a special guest appearance from "grandmaster of flash" David Gaffney. In June, FlashTag will be holding an event as part of Didsbury Arts Festival, on Friday 28 at 8pm in the Albert Club.

Also for DAF, myself and David will be reading (sans keyboard!) and chatting about the micro fiction form. That will be at Pizza Express on Lapwing Lane, on Tuesday 25 June at 7.30pm. Mmm, pizza. Next Wedneday evening (7.30pm), David and I will be performing as Les Malheureux at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool as part of the Writing On The Wall festival, which runs throughout May (see the second issue of the north west edition of The Skinny, out tomorrow, for my feature on the literary shindig, and Creative Tourist later this week for a piece on the In Other Words festival and reopening of Liverpool's Central Library). Then on Thursday, it's the pre-launch of David's latest collection of short-short stories, More Sawn-Off Tales, when he'll be reading at The Bakerie Tasting Store alongside Rodge Glass and Anneliese Mackintosh. The book is out on Salt Publishing on Wednesday 15 May, and the official launch takes place on Thursday 13 June at Takk cafe in the Northern Quarter (doors 6pm), also featuring Gregory Norminton and his new book Thumbnails; a unique spoken word DJ set from the Simms-Luddingtons of Monkeys In Love, and me doing the intros. All these events are free, so you'd be a fool not to join us at something! David is doing stacks more readings over the next couple of months - see his website for all the dates.

Cast aspersions

On the bus this morning, two young lasses were talking about acting and their inability to do method. I should have told them about this event on Sunday, when a number of workshop and audition sessions will be taking place at RNCM to recruit company members to join the next site-specific production by Library Theatre. It'll be their third site-specific show and, following the successes of 2011's Hard Times and last year's Manchester Lines, it promises to be pretty exciting.

Manchester Sound: The Massacre is going to take place at a secret venue (how MIF!) between Saturday 8 June and Saturday 6 July and, written by Polly Wiseman and directed by Paul Jepson, it draws on very varied, yet significant aspects of the city's history: the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and the explosion of rave culture in 1989.

The Library Theatre Company is looking for volunteers aged 16 and over with energy and commitment to work alongside the professional cast and crew from Tuesday 7 May, when rehearsals start, so book onto Sunday's event by calling Cornerhouse box office on 0161 200 1500 quick sharp.

Route master

The future wasn’t so bright for Preston on Saturday when it seemed the end was nigh – but an innovative live literature event proved otherwise...

Just last week, BBC2’s last bastion of artsiness The Culture Show (The Review Show doesn’t count – the outfits are too awful) took afternoon tea in the resplendent surroundings of one of the north’s architectural icons. No, not Morecambe’s Art Deco Midland Hotel or Manchester’s Gothic Town Hall; rather Preston’s Brutalist bus station, in the greasy spoon. The rigs and cameras were rolled into England’s newest city to highlight the building’s plight: namely that its future is bleak as the cost of refurbishment has gone through the roof, and demolition is on the cards.

Preston Bus Station’s imminent destruction was then the focus of an inventive and unusual one-off spoken word project, which took place on Saturday. The concrete edifice (once, so legend has it, the second largest bus station in Western Europe) became the backdrop to a promenade literature event, Journey To The End Of The World, when two sets of audience members were wired up with headphones and guided around different locations to experience storytelling in various forms.

The tour began with composition, transitioned through poetry and terminated with short stories. MC Brad Bromley led the groups first to experimental singing ensemble Noizechoir, who often work site specifically to capture the essence of a space; although Preston-born Marek Gabrysch said it was a first for them to approach a live spoken word piece, joining forces with poet Bruce Rafeek to perform a eulogy for the legendary landmark. Next stop was another Manchester-based poet, Shamshad Khan, who recited Body Clothes, pieces about transformation and death, challenging us to accept change we cannot control. Micro fiction writer and one-fifth of the FlashTag writing collective David Hartley (pictured), a former Prestonian, offered an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure-style story called “Choose Your Own Apocalypse”, handing the fate of mankind to one member of the audience. “If they pick the right choices, they could save the world,” David explained to me before the event. “Wrong ones, and we are all doomed.” As it turned out, the first group blew us to smithereens.

Journey To The End Of The World involved the audience actually embarking on a journey ourselves, both physically as we wandered around the 1960s behemoth, and emotionally as we reacted to each apocalyptic vision of the future with which we were presented. Being forced to listen to a narrative unfold via individual headsets engages audience members directly and heightens the personal response to each piece and the event as a whole – it’s been successful before in projects such as David Gaffney’s Station Stories for Manchester Literature Festival and Lavinia Greenlaw’s Audio Obscura for Manchester International Festival, both of which made Piccadilly railway station their transport hub of choice. And it worked again here, as literature blogger Sarah Jasmon describes: “We’d all been given headphones, through which we were fed the eerie sound of a thousand bus stations. The multi-layered result – the shhhing sound of sliding doors being closed, the reversing beeps and revving engines – was amazing!”

The action wrapped up in Preston Bus Station’s aforementioned café, virtually unchanged since its original fit-out, with playwright and director Phil Ormrod’s new work, An Hour Before the End of the World, in which two people await the apocalypse. Says Phil: “I’m hoping the experience gave the audience a different relationship to the passage of time, and a renewed love for the bus station.”

All the pieces were specially commissioned for the performance by Preston-based arts engagement organisation They Eat Culture, and the event was produced in association with Northern Elements, a spoken word development project for Arts Council England. Ruth Heritage, Director of They Eat Culture, which incorporates Lancashire Writing Hub, where I've been running some interviews with the Journey artists, says: “It’s been a joy to be able to translate spoken word into a site-responsive event on and for the Bus Station. It deserves a moment of glory where we celebrate the place; and, of course, all the journeys, endings and beginnings which happen daily.”

Image: Bernie Blackburn bernieblac@netscape.net

Plug One

My gang, the FlashTag writing collective, is pleased to announce its participation in Chorlton Arts Festival (CAF) for the third year running, and is now inviting entries for its annual short-short story writing competition.

The FlashTag Writing Competition is now open for submissions with the closing date set for midnight on Friday 26 April. Entry is free and stories are invited from anyone over the age of 18, be they published authors or first-time storytellers. Tying in with this year’s CAF theme, stories must be inspired by “past, present and future”, although this can be interpreted in any way. Rules: stories must not exceed 400 words; stories must not have been published previously, in print or online; multiple or simultaneous submissions are not accepted; offensive material will be disqualified. All entries will be judged anonymously and the shortlist will be announced on Friday 10 May. The winner and runners-up will be revealed at a fun spoken word event during Chorlton Arts Festival, on Wednesday 22 May, with prizes including a goody-bag of signed books and personalised postcards from some of our favourite authors. Full competition entry details are at flashtagmcr.wordpress.com with updates on Twitter @FlashtagMcr. The group can be contacted via flashtagmcr@gmail.com.

 FlashTag writer Sarah-Clare Conlon (that's me!) says: “We are delighted to be teaming up with Chorlton Arts Festival for a third year as we’ve been really pleased with the quantity and quality of entries in our previous competitions and we always enjoy holding a fun event with live readings and games and, of course, the glittering awards ceremony!”

FlashTag consists of five award-winning and critically acclaimed micro fiction writers: David Hartley, Tom Mason, Benjamin Judge, Sarah-Clare Conlon and Fat Roland. The collective has collaborated on a number of writing projects, including short story competitions and spoken word evenings at Chorlton Arts Festival in 2011 and 2012, Smut Night at Didsbury Arts Festival 2011 and Word>Play at DAF 2012, and a “flash fiction flashmob” as part of the first-ever National Flash-Fiction Day, in May 2012. The group regularly performs together at spoken word events around the UK and their work is published with Salt Publishing, Comma Press, Gumbo Press, Flax, Paraxis, Ferment, 330 Words and others.

Chorlton Arts Festival runs from Friday 17 May to Sunday 26 May. It is a showcase for visual and performing artists, both local and international, and one of the largest multi-arts events in the north of England. Tickets and Chorlton Weekender wristbands are now on sale via the website: chorltonartsfestival.com. 

Get to it, lads!

A Wondrous Place #5: Rags to Bitches

A couple of posts ago, I touched on Manchester’s current paper art, and as we head south out of town towards Fallowfield, let’s peek inside the gorgeous Whitworth Art Gallery, where there’s an outstanding archive of wallpaper. There is also a number of Wardle Pattern Books containing more than 1,700 pages of patterns for fabric by the designer associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris and Liberty.

A little further along Europe’s busiest bus route is the vast Platt Fields Park, overlooked by the Modernist beauty that is the Toast Rack (complete with Fried Egg) and the 1930s Art Deco delight that is Appleby Lodge, designed by the same architect as the soon-to-be-defunct Cornerhouse and once home to Sir John Barbirolli, conductor of the Halle Orchestra (and honoured with a blue plaque – gosh, perhaps I am a plaque collector, after all!).

Platt Fields is also home to the Gallery of Costume, reopened in 2010 after a complete overhaul, and already mentioned on A Wondrous Place by Pete Collins. On top of a well-curated permanent collection of outfits and accessories through the eras, there is a button exhibition (no good for the koumpounophobists among you, I’m afraid), a timeline contextualising the Gallery by reminding us of Manchester’s importance in textile manufacture, and changing shows; right now, dresses made of paper.

“A good specimen is one which is not only in sound condition and of nice quality, but which embodies the features of its period in an entirely representative way” – fashion writer Doris Langley Moore on collecting

There are get-ups that belonged to the likes of Jerry Hall and Audrey Hepburn – in the latter’s case, a 1967 fuchsia button-through belted frock designed for the film star and fashion icon by Givenchy. There are a few writer connections, too. There’s a trademark Roberto Cavalli leopard-print number worn by Julia Roitfeld, daughter of Carine, editor of Paris Vogue until last year. There’s a wool suit owned by art and fashion historian and writer – and Lord Byron scholar – Doris Langley Moore, who had so many clothes, she kept them in her large house while she herself had to move to a small flat. There’s an evening dress created in the mid-1930s by Edward Molyneux, who mingled in the same circles as Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward, no less. (By the way, the title of this post references a former vintage shop in the Northern Quarter; it’s not a reflection on the people mentioned!)  The building, which itself is most pleasant – a Grade 2 listed Georgian manor – also houses a comprehensive fashion journal library containing glossy magazines and periodicals dating back more than 100 years. Some are displayed alongside the actual garments shown in the spreads, while the complete collection is available to view by appointment. As a former fashion magazine journo, I’m making that appointment. But for now, I’m not far from home, so I’m off to kick back and have a well-deserved pre-dinner sherry.  

Thank you for reading! I hope this guide to Manchester’s literature and libraries has been as interesting for you to digest as it has been for me to put together, and I hope it might inspire you to pop a poetry night in your diary or pick up a book by a Manchester-based author. Obviously it’s not comprehensive, and there are plenty of people and places I’ve not had chance to mention (how about alternative depositories such as the virtual Rainy City Stories, for example, or the Salford Zine Library, where fellow A Wondrous Place contributor Natalie Bradbury’s The Shrieking Violet is one of the tomes?), but perhaps it can be a starting point. Thank you, too, to the people who have answered my questions and provided photographs (particularly Gareth Hacking for his original images of the Portico Library, more of which can be seen on Creative Tourist). Finally, a big thank you to Chris Meads for giving me the opportunity to explore my city further – it really is a wondrous place!