Litfest

May 4, 2010

Dominic Kelly on storytelling

Filed under: Guests — Andy Darby @ 9:52 am

Storytelling as a performance art has enjoyed a renaissance over the last 30 years. As it heads into the second decade of the 21st century, there is an unprecedented breadth and depth of exciting new work touring the country. The immediacy and improvisation of re-telling narrative through the spoken word is taking stages by storm from the Barbican and the National Theatre to major literature festivals and arts centres across the UK. Storytelling is distinct from either written literature or theatre – unlike the work of an author, storytelling is communal by nature: it can only happen when a storyteller, a story and an audience come together;  in theatre the audience observes the drama unfolding on the stage, but in storytelling it unfolds in the audiences minds – it is the cinema of the imagination, with the energy and intensity of live performance.  The building blocks of performance storytellers’ repertoires in the UK is material from the oral tradition. Increasingly though, they are pushing the boundaries of storytelling, whether it be translocating adult fairy tales into modern urban life or weaving together personal or historical stories with traditional tales to create performance pieces full of complex resonance between our lives and the timeless symbolism in folktales and myth. As Erica Wagner has written, “It is this ability to blend the personal and the mythological that makes the art of the storyteller so mysterious and wonderful. New and old stories blend in the mouth of the teller and the ear of the listener, and gaps between worlds are bridged”.

Another feature of the new storytelling is the range of collaboration, exploring the new worlds that open up when two storyteller’s bring their styles and stories together. Pete Chand and Shonaleigh are highly experienced storytellers who bring together not only their own distinct voices and repertoire but also the cultures they grew up with – Pete’s Punjabi heritage and Shonaleigh’s Jewish roots. Come along on Wednesday evening to Litfest to see what happens when they collide.

October 22, 2009

Why we’re looking forward to Sunday 25th October

Filed under: Guests — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Andy Darby @ 1:33 pm

Guest Post by Jane Routh and Mike Barlow

When Andy Darby, Litfest’s Director, first asked for suggestions we drew up a long list – poets whose work we admire but haven’t heard read; poets we’ve heard read once or twice and wish were better known so more people could enjoy their work; or poets who are already well-known but haven’t come to Litfest before. And then, as we studied the list, certain names seemed to fall into pairs quite naturally.

To begin with there are the Irish. John McAuliffe’s first collection A Better Life (Gallery Press) had been shortlisted for a Forward prize in 2004. It’s highly rated by August Kleinzhaler, no less. There’s a facility and music on the page that makes us want to hear him. We’d heard Jim Caruth reading from his first collection A Stone’s Throw (Staple First Editions) a couple of years ago. The economy and directness of his writing is very moving, and his voice gives it all an understated and particular music. He’s from Ulster, while John’s from Eire but both live in England – another thing that made them a natural pairing.

Luke Kennard’s first small collection, The Solex Brothers (Stride), introduced a fresh, offbeat and surreal voice. With The Harbour Beyond the Movie (Salt) he became the youngest writer ever to have been shortlisted for the Forward prize. Hearing him read, his work became even funnier and richer in its unpredictable imagery. David Grubb’s writing seems to complement this with its fluency and pace and idiosyncratic syntax. While both take a slant view of life and events, David’s is a serious world seriously addressed in matters of family, faith and his experiences working in conflict zones throughout the world. He’s written many collections – the latest, The Man Who Spoke to Owls (Shearsman) – all of which carry an emotional punch as powerful as Luke Kennard’s surprises and belly laughs.

Paula Jennings’s poetry is carefully crafted, passionate and often brave. Her first collection Singing Lucifer (Onlywomen Press) sold out in the first print run. Last year Happenstance published From The Body of the Green Girl. She writes with compassion about people and relationships and a strong and individual spirituality comes through. Ann Sansom has two full collections from Bloodaxe, Romance and In Praise of Men and Other People. She also writes powerfully of people and relationships, but hers is a more complex and ambiguous world rendered in rhythmic and graphic language.

Since James Lasdun’s here as a short story writer, it’s a brilliant opportunity to hear his poetry too. Born in England, he now lives in New York and his finely crafted collection Landscape with Chainsaw (Cape) deals with identity and belonging and the everyday realities of making a home in strange territory. Michael Laskey, well known as poet, facilitator, editor and founder of Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, has a recent New and Selected, The Man Alone (Smiths Doorstop). He too writes about home, the everyday, the domestic with a perceptive and sympathetic eye and ear. We’re hoping that two skilled English poets from different sides of the Atlantic on the same stage will prove a serendipitous occasion.

October 19, 2009

Carys Davies on Short Fiction

Filed under: Guests — Tags: , , , , , — Andy Darby @ 12:10 pm

Guest Post by Carys Davies

I’m delighted to be introducing the short fiction programme at Litfest this year – four celebrated writers, all very different from each other, all masters of this notoriously tricky, deliciously entertaining art form.

Alison Macleod - credit Kate Macleod Jan 09 Panos Karnezis’s collection Little Infamies opens a door into a nameless Greek village, a hot and dusty world where no one has ever seen a camera, where the local doctor performs operations with the help of a mail-order manual. It’s peopled with a delightful cast of eccentrics – a priest and a bartender, a barber, a prostitute, a man dressed up as a centaur, and many others. It’s a place of yearning and stalled hopes and unrequited love, of sly tricks and underhand cunning and murder. Hearing these tales, with their deadpan humour and lyrically precise language it’s almost impossible to believe that Karnezis only began to write in English in 1996.

Alison MacLeod’s taboo-breaking stories, meanwhile, deal with desire in its many manifestations: her Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction are by turns disturbing, comic, and affecting. Known for her willingness to experiment with form, MacLeod skilfully mixes the erotic with the erudite – meditations on chaos theory, dark matter and entropy co-exist in a collection where a teenage hairdresser is drawn to a man who has died beside her on a park bench; where a man pursues a heavily pregnant woman through an IKEA store. MacLeod is also a passionate performer – I’ve heard her read her heart-breaking story ‘Dirty Weekend’ and it moved me to tears.

James Lasdun – who grew up in the UK but is a long-time resident of New York – won the inaugural National Short Story Prize with ‘An Anxious Man’. Lasdun is an accomplished poet and novelist and his short fiction is blessed with the graceful restraint of the poetry and the page-turning creepiness of the novels. What I love about ‘An Anxious Man’, and many of Lasdun’s other stories, is the sense of entering a world where something dreadful is going to happen. Invariably it’s a world peopled by those (most of them men) so tortured by their neuroses that seemingly everyday situations – a family holiday by the beach, a walk in the country, an invitation for drinks – morph and swivel into something far more sinister and threatening.

Many will be familiar with Sean O’Brien the poet but not, perhaps, with his darkly entertaining foray into short stories, The Silence Room. Mostly set in an eerily gothic Newcastle-Upon-Tyne these tales are shot through with a sense of unease, of the uncanny, a blurring between reality and the fantastic. In them, the city becomes a place of mysteries and ghosts and puzzles. They are funny, surprising, beautifully written and, on occasion, deeply moving – I particularly adore the opening story, which follows the narrator on a journey through the city’s strange and nightmarish landscape as he follows a series of mysterious messages, only to discover, in the end, that they have come from his father, who he can never reach.

October 7, 2009

The African Booker

Filed under: Guests — Tags: , , , — Andy Darby @ 4:36 pm
EC Osondu

EC Osundu

Guest blog by Graham Mort

When Monica Arac de Nyeko won the Caine prize in 2007 I had just returned from directing a literature project in Kampala and my inbox began to overflow with tributes from her fellow Ugandan writers. The prize had shone a light into one of the smaller African countries where authors had struggled to establish themselves after years of civil war and a huge HIV/Aids epidemic. The delight of Ugandan writers – and then those from other countries engaged in the project – was tangible and moving.

That generosity of spirit, the commitment to the collective ideals of literature and, above all, a sense that good writing has a vital role in negotiating the terms of human existence, is what has drawn me and many others to a love of African writing. The very term ‘African literature’ itself is problematic, with its elision of cultural and linguistic difference and its emphasis on written forms. But if we interpret it as inclusive of huge diversity, then we can use it as an essential – but not essentialising – shorthand.

A glance down the list of Caine prizewinners, and those shortlisted, is enough to indicate its influence and variety. Founded in the short story – perhaps particularly suited to cultures that have their literary roots in oral traditions – it has proved to be a flexible platform from which to showcase a wide range of styles and themes. An anthology of such writing is a journey in which dreams and fabulation meet contradictory, inescapable, and uncomfortable realities.

As the nations of the world are forced closer together in their negotiations about climate change, patterns of production, consumption and poverty, Africa’s huge territories and populations will be of increasing importance to how we conceptualise and nurture the planet. Literature is a primary form of understanding, revealing how tantalisingly different and fundamentally alike we are. Often, it is our first and abiding experience of other places and peoples and it will play a key role in this process of transformative exchange through the specific locations, characters, linguistic invention and cultural energy of its writing.

I’m really proud to be introducing Chika Unigwe and EC Osundu at LitFest and look forward to experiencing their work there with you.

June 22, 2009

so true and so beautiful you wonder why you never read it before

Filed under: Guests — Andy Darby @ 10:07 am

Every once in a while you come across a book that changes your entire perspective on what literature is, or should be or can do; you find a narrative that transcends conventions, that just seems so true and so beautiful you wonder why you never read it before, or how one book could speak so directly to you- as though it were written exclusively for your personal enjoyment. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer is such a book.

Knowing he was coming to Litfest, I wanted to read the book and just get a handle on what his style of writing was before I saw him; I wasn’t expecting to be moved in the way I was. It’s a book that demands time. It’s a book that makes you pause and re-read bits, wanting to say them aloud even if there’s nobody in the room just to let the beauty of the language wrap itself around your tongue. It’s a book of such wide, accepting love that it is quite simply remarkable.  More than a narrative, one feels as a reader as though one is being presented with a new philosophy on life; a new way of living, and interacting and touching.

Definitions of what love or sex or companionship mean stretch as long and wide as the American landscapes Shed and the other characters travel through.  I can’t really say it better than the books says it for itself:
“There’s really only a very short time that we get hair and teeth and put on red cloth and have bones and skin and look out eyes. Not for long. Some folks longer than others. If you re lucky, you ll get to be the one who tells the story: how the eyes have seen, the hair has blown, the caress the skin has felt, how the bones have ached. What the human heart is like,  he said. How the devil called and we did not answer. How we answered.”

Wow.

Guest blog post by Andrew McMillan. Andrew studies literature at Lancaster University and his poetry is published in Flax018. Tom Spanbauer reads at Litfest’s Summer Readings at The Storey on Wednesday night.

January 15, 2009

Dark secrets and deep betrayals in a Victorian madhouse

Filed under: Guests, Jonathan Bean — Tags: , — Jonathan Bean @ 2:31 pm

Hot on the heels of the last post telling you of one Flax Author’s recent success, comes news of another. Both Ian seed and Jane Eagland appeared in “Square Cuts Flax001″, the inaugural Flax publication from a couple of years back. So it’s interesting to find both have debut books out this year.

Jane’s debut book “Wildthorn” is published by Macmillan in March.

The story is set in the 1870s, where “Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove longs to break free from her respectable life as a Victorian doctor’s daughter. But her dreams become a nightmare when Louisa is sent to Wildthorn Hall: labelled a lunatic, deprived of her liberty and even her real name. As she unravels the betrayals that led to her incarceration, she realizes there are many kinds of prison. She must be honest with herself – and others – in order to be set free. And love may be the key . . .”

You can read more about Jane in a recent feature in The Bookseller Magazine here…

And for further information, or to order a copy of the book look no further than Pan Macmillan…

October 19, 2008

On a wet Tuesday night,

Filed under: Guests — Tags: , — Andrew McMillan @ 7:42 am

the Castle sits ominously above the city conducting the weather and the darkness that’s wrapping itself around the streets like a scarf.  I could go on, but this blog is meant to be about Paul Durcan, and he could write something much better deeper and beautiful anyway. I’m ashamed to say that this last Tuesday night was actually my first encounter with Durcan’s work; and what a first encounter it was. This wasn’t a performance, discussion nor even a reading; this was a Reading, in the sense that demands the use of a Proper Noun.

Surrounded by 650 shields bearing the arms of every English monarch, Lancaster Castle Constable and High Sherriff of Lancashire since Richard the Lionheart, in a room where voices seem to be pulled up into the dome of the roof, the audience had every right to expect something grand. They were not disappointed.  As Durcan stepped up, in an almost stately manner, an impromptu bell-ringing session began. After quelling the audience’s nerves with a quick joke, he began to read anyway. The bells
soon stopped ringing. A woman in the row in front of me turned around and muttered  the power of poetry, eh?  and smiled in a way that I like to think only poetry can make people smile.

Durcan’s poetry was at times funny, moving and profound. His two-liner about an Irish resident commenting that they never go abroad for their holidays, only to America, reminds me of the dry, ironic whit of Thom Gunn whereas longer poems move the audience to fits of laughter and quiet contemplation in equal measure. All but a few of the very shortest poems draw applause from the audience. Not the sort of polite applause that sometimes prevail at poetry gatherings either, but the sort of applause which seems utterly spontaneous as if compelled by the words themselves. There is no banter with the crowd, no discussion except the simplest of notes on a place or a reference specific to a certain poem, there is nothing but the text. Nothing but the poems.

When it s over the audience pushes towards the book-stall, buy little sections of what they’ve just witnessed, and head for home. As I step outside, I realise the heavy rain of before has been replaced by a calmness of leaves and stars. I think of that woman on the row in front of me, how right she may well have been. The power of poetry, eh?

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