Litfest

We launched Vanishing Act, the latest Flax anthology, on Wednesday night. And now it’s all over I can admit how nervous I was about the event. Because the anthology itself was a bit of an experiment – riffing off our standard audio films and playing with potentials of the spoken word – we’d decided to experiment a little with presenting it to people.

First there were the straight readings from the writers’ back catalogue as it were, then we went into darkness to hear the audio tracks for people to form their own imagined and emotional responses to the work without any visual triggers.

Then we heard the audio tracks accompanied by films made by Morph Films, who had made five responses to the work. When I spoke to them about that process, Gareth spoke how much he enjoyed not thinking about what the client might want, but to just register his response to the piece and turn that into a visual response. He translated the rhythms of speech into visual rhythms, and sought out the less obvious elements to present. So not literal at all.

The evening finished with the creators of the work reading the pieces again. Reowning them, as it were. So the five pieces of Vanishing Act were heard three times. Risky. But it paid off. People really responded to the opportunity to hear a piece delivered in different ways and spoke of how strikingly different that made their own responses. I loved the theatricality of the event, especially the alertness of listening in the dark.

So, if you missed it, shame, but you can relive it in part by listening to each piece or watching the videos made in response to the poems here.

‘To be held. To be loved in a simple way. But simple things were always the hardest.’ (From ‘The Caretaker’)

Like other fine story writers, such as Carver or Pavese, Graham Mort possesses the gift of making ordinary lives extraordinary. With gritty yet graceful language, Mort creates a unique poetry out of the everyday and the banal. He makes beauty out of what we regard as uninteresting or unattractive. His observations are keen and precise (I often found myself thinking of cinematic shots), yet there is also a strong sensuous quality about his writing, deeply veined with metaphor and simile.

Read sentences like this and it is impossible not to want to read more: ‘There is a mobile phone with its face smashed and frozen into the slush of snow […] We hardly talk now. As if words are being pressed back, as if these are the black covers of a bible we are shut between’. (From ‘A Walk in the Snow’).

Some of the characters in Mort’s stories commit carelessly cruel, or even ‘evil’ deeds. Yet they are not ‘bad’ people. Rather, they are driven to such acts because of the circumstances in which they find themselves. For example, Mort is able to make us identify with a fourteen-year old girl who, in a senseless random act, kills a duckling. The personal is never isolated, but is cleverly interwoven with the political and social. Mort is a ‘committed writer’, yet we are never ranted at. He does not offer solutions, but by implication poses questions for us to think about. We are shown what happens when people separated by different experiences of the modern world try in vain to communicate with each other, such as an old widowed farmer and a call centre sales rep. For a lesser writer, it would be easy to slip into sentimentality or into a kind of patronising tone. Yet although Mort is a deeply compassionate author, we never feel sorry for anyone. Rather we enter right inside the fractured worlds of his characters to see and feel things from their point of view.

There is a melancholy throughout, and death is always present, even as an absence, or as something or someone missing. Yet there is also a wicked humour and a deep faith in the possibilities of life. The stories work at more than one level. They are firmly located in time and place – from the hills of Cumbria to the streets of Kampala – yet point beyond themselves to universal truths about the way we suffer and live in a world whose forces are beyond our control. Paradoxically, we are challenged by implication to consider how we can act as agents for change both in our own lives and in a wider context. However tragic some of these stories may be, we come away feeling enriched.

In a post-modern society, it is frequently the flashy tricks which grab most of our attention – for a short while. In contrast, the stories in Touch form a genuine literature, whose poetry will be as moving and meaningful in years to come.

Ian Seed