News and views

Invitation to Tender

Posted By: Anonymous, 27 August 2010

Writers’ Centre Norwich is leading the development of an International Centre for Writing and Innovation. This is a fantastically exciting development backed by a committed local authority, HE, FE and NDPB partnership. We are inviting tenders for two linked pieces of work examining options appraisals, partnership agreements, impact studies and feasibility appraisals for the ICWI that build on the work undertaken in 2009-10 by Tom Fleming Creative Consultants. The full brief is available from the Job Vacancies  page

Edinburgh East to Edinburgh blog - Dean Parkin

Posted By: Anonymous, 23 August 2010

The Story of The Story Of
Monday, August 23, 2010

 

Of all the puns iin all the world...The story of Dean's Dad's Ducks and my Dad's dodgy double life hit the local papers back home earlier this month (sort of 40 years too late). They slightly played up the whole 'local man in double life shocker' theme and briefly, for that day (today's newspaper is tomorrow's chip paper), it caused a stir in the village where I was born and my mother still lives. It also gave the local paper the chance to do a duck pun in their own inimitable style (see above).    

Stories and lies are a theme of Dean's Dad's Ducks - as my mother pointed out to people who asked her 'Dean just makes things up, you know what he's like' (she said this with a smile by the way) - and the title poem of the show sort of deals with this and is actually called, 'The Story of'. A version of it appeared in my last pamphlet Just Our Luck.... The thing about memories and stories and lies is that you just can't tell what's true or not, can you, in the end.

 
The Story Of

The story of the nut allergy.

How you know you’ve got it and why you aren’t dead.

The story of the whelk stuck in your throat,

of the fishing line hooking Simon King by the cheek.

 

The story of, the story of, the story of

 

The story of the kipper and the grandmother,

my mother’s story, the story I always get wrong.

You just make things up!

The story of the father and two sons in search of the cat –

each brought back a different one and the story

of the real cat that returned while they were out looking.

 

The story of, the story of, the story of…

 

The story of watching the morning arrive,

the sky clicking on its light, like that.

And the three men on a lawn massaging

someone’s else’s girlfriend until

that light came on.

Like your story of the two of you,

taking off your clothes, laying there together.

Of just talking, not touching.

 

The story of, the story of, the story of…

 

The story of the woman on the bus.

Of how beautiful a woman can be,

surrounded  by pensioners and a young man

with tremendous acne.

 

The story of the warts. Of the place on your finger

where you can still feel you had them.

The story of it being thirty years ago,

of lemon squash in milk bottles.

 

The story of running,

how it’s not a race any more, of getting older.

Realising  it’s not going to stop until it does.

 

The story of, the story of, the story of…

 

The story of the waiting room,

of having nothing to read, of thinking

to yourself, how long am I going to be?

 

The story of seventeen seconds one afternoon

when you wanted to change everything,

then decided against it.

The story of nothing but the same old story,

the long story you were told

to cut. Get to the bloody point!

The weekend shows went well - with so many shows under my belt, I know feel very comfortable with the material and I'm still enjoying doing it, enjoying that confidence. Every now and then you get a day when you feel drained and a bit knackered (you can see that in the faces of the other performers) and Sunday I did feel a bit lack lustre. You just have to look after yourself and try and change gear. Saw a magnificent show on Saturday evening - a weird tango opera called 'Maria de Beunos Aires' with a Tom Waits-ian type live band, dancers, singers and clowns (not Ronald McDonald type clowns, just ones with white faces). I didn't know what was going on all the time but didn't care. It was like watching a Marc Chagall picture that came to life. Terrific - the most weird and wonderful thing I've seen at the Festival so far.


The Story Behind the Door
Saturday, August 21, 2010



My very own keyhole (where you'l find me of an afternoon)...

This is the door. It's the place you will find me everyday at 5.10pm. Waiting for 5.15pm in a corridor. Occasionally people walk by noisily having their life, chatting, laughing, then see me and quieten and nod. Sometimes they apologise. They can see what I'm doing. I'm about to go on, waiting for my cue...

During the first couple of shows I simply went through the door - I didn't know how big the audience would be (I know how many tickets have sold but don't know the number of walk-ups on the day) - so the first day I hoped there would be more people than there was and the second day I was surprised that there were so many people. The third day I found the keyhole. The keyhole looks directly towards the other door in the venue, the door that people come into the venue. So once Sophie, my sound engineer and front of house person, has sound-checked and checked the lights etc, I go out of my door and she goes to her door and lets the people in. And I crouch down at the keyhole and find out who and what will be the audience today.

Sometimes the dance troupe upstairs finish late, just as I'm about to start (5.10pm to be precise), and their audience departs down the stairs and through my corridor (where I'm crouching to watch my audience arrive). Some days, every now and then, someone just walks past and sees a man with a briefcase at a keyhole. Sometimes I pretend I'm tying my shoelaces (this isn't very convincing). I've been caught once kissing my duck ("It's for good luck," I explained. The woman smiled and hurried along). I've also started talking to my duck too (it is the only other member of my cast) - not long conversations I hasten to add, just the odd word or two. I suppose, what I'm saying is, if you do come across a man doing slightly odd things in a corridor at 5.10pm don't worry. I'm an 'affable' guy (in three of my reviews that is the common word to describe me) and I'm also probably a little mad (we are gettting to the third week of The Fringe). And I'm about to go on, about to do the last minute check that I've got my rail ticket with me (all part of the show) and say my first line again, start today's journey. So, think of me, if only briefly, won't you at 5.10pm behind my very own green (greeny blue) door...

 
The Story of The Director
DateThursday, August 19, 2010



Two men and their ducks. Mine's a jumbo and Paul's is 'generously sized'.

I don't know many directors (I am not flush with theatrical contacts living in a remote Suffolk village which does at least boast an excellent fish and chip shop and a Chinese takeaway). I really only know one director, the director of my show. You only need one though, don't you? I first met Paul Warwick, in Shropshire in 2003. I was an Arvon Jerwood Young Poet (ah, to be 'young' again!) and he was a fresh faced Arvon Writing Centre Director (him and his long-term business partner Ed Collier had set-up the freshly converted John Osborne Writing Centre). The Arvon Jerwood scheme gave us a week at the centre with our mentors. Paul and Ed liked my poems and invited me back a few times over the next 3/4 years to do guest readings on schools' courses.

I next bumped into Paul at the Edinburgh Fringe last year in the Assembly Rooms. Paul and Ed had left Arvon and had formed China Plate (which acts 'as a conduit for collaboration and encouraging leaps into unknown creative territory') and both now direct and produce award-winning and innovative plays for the theatre. Paul asked me what I was up to, I said I was developing a one man show and he said, 'do you want a director?' It was one of those Yes please moments. I was immediately excited. That was the moment when doing a show at Edinburgh became a reality. The rest is history, or at least the story of this very strange year.

It's been brilliant working with Paul - from the first five day session in March and late nights listening to Billy Bragg in the Mancave (we also celebrated Paul's birthday with a bakewell tart bloke feeding frenzy) to the week he spent up in Edinburgh with me, bedding in the show at the beginning of the month.  He's also the first person ever to really push me and try to drive me forward. Paul also loved the Mancave and was very impressed with me being so close to a fish and chip shop and Chinese takeaway (it takes a top bloke to see that). It's been a terrific experience working with him. Thank you Paul.

This week's shows have continued where I left off on Sunday. I'm feeling more confident about the show and as a result it's mostly going with a swing. The mood of the audience does seem to change day to day, I don't think it's me, but sometimes they are quiet, sometimes they laugh, sometimes they don't know when they should laugh - I think that's it. I can see them smiling though and feel them listening, which is the main thing. On Tuesday and Wednesday I had nice big audiences - it's really great to have the Cabaret Bar packed. They've been fairly quiet audiences on both days though but I've had some friendly feedback at the door afterwards when I hand out the programme and duck postcards. One man said yesterday, 'I'm not sure what that was but thank you, that was strange! I mean, amazing!  And strange. Is any of it true?' I raised one eyebrow in a quizzical fashion and said, 'of course it is'. As Nick Lowe once sang, All Men Are Liars (And That's The Truth)...

The Story of Saving a Pigeon from Baguette Express
Sunday, August 15, 2010

In Edinburgh ducks are allowed to travel for free on buses (at the back).

For Saturday's show I came out fighting (after Friday's stodgy audience plus I knew there was a reviewer in). However this was probably the most obvious reviewer of all time - he sat at a table directly in front of me writing in his notebook (either that or he was my stepmother's solicitor). His girlfriend seemed to like the show so fingers crossed. But I was delivering it all rather aggressively to begin with. The audience didn't know whether to laugh or cry or be afraid! I suddenly got in the groove half way through - the last half of the show, which is the sad half, got more laughs than ever before. It just seemed to work. I was a little bit down for Sunday's show but when I walked on stage today, it fell into place. The audience were lovely and were with me all the way. An old guy came up to me at the end with tears in his eyes and said 'your Dad was very lucky to have you'. That almost made me spontaneously blub! But I am a bloke and a British bloke at that so I sniffed it off. I must have got something in my eye... But audiences and days like this make it all worth doing.

On the way back, swinging my briefcase, whistling an Elvis Costello tune, a pigeon flew at me and missed and went head first into Baguette Express. It then played pigeon pinball flying the length of the shop and then against the window. And then against the window, and then against the window. The staff came at with brooms which didn't helped. So the Pigeon Whisperer stepped in. I told them to calm down, go and get a box. By this time the pigeon had come to rest in the window display with a bad headache. They handed me the box and I gently played the 'walls are closing in trick', putting the box behind it and edging it, escorting it to the door. It saw the light and flew for it. I got a free caramel slice for my trouble. All in a day's work...  


The Story of the Swan Machine
Saturday, August 14, 2010



My Mum Hev, back then, with Swan Machine

In Dean's Dad's Ducks I mention The Swan Machine. And to prove such a thing existed - here's a picture of my Mum at work on one in our kitchen in 1985. As I might have mentioned, my father was a toymaker and was a plastic blow-moulder manufacturer. My mother used to help out with factory work in the evenings. She used to put the squeak in the squeakers to go on the bottom of those sweet-filled walking sticks. But mainly she used to drill swans on the swan machine...

The Swan Machine

was in the kitchen, next to the fridge. Two feet high,

a black frame with a motor and drill for making

six holes in swans (three each side)

for daffodils to grow through. The plastic shavings

flew everywhere. My mother drilled

and turned up the radio. We kept the kitchen door shut.

My father reloaded the garage with black sacks,

the occasional beak pecking through.

My mother drilled – each time she switched on,

the living room lights would flicker. When we heard

the drill skid and snarl, the machine would stop

and we knew she’d missed a hole and hoped

it was the swan that had taken the gouge. She sat

on one of our dining room chairs (covered,

so it wouldn’t spoil). For comfort

there was a length of foam for her to rest her elbows

as she held the swan up to the drill. She drilled

and swore when the dog wanted to be let out,

let back in, Bloody dog! The motor was slow

to start, rising to a drone through the house.

She drilled to get cash from my father

who gave her more swans

and arthritis. What’s that?

my friends would ask when the buzzing

interfered with ‘Tomorrow’s World’ on TV.

That’s my mother, I would say, proud

to have a swan machine in the house.

*

Wednesday's show was the best so far - a lovely warm responsive audience, it really flew. There was even a Total Theatre Reviewer in (pity The 3 star Scotsman reviewer was in the day before!) and did get a good review from her. I also swung through Thursday's show but Friday's had a very stodgy audience, very unresponsive although they were smiling (some of them were smiling). Sophie, my sound engineer, agreed 'You were okay', she said, 'but they were so silent!'. I barely got a 'bubblewrap' out of them (audience participation poem).  Then she told me in a quiet even voice, so as not to frighten me, that there were two press tickets amongst the audience. Ah. Hopefully they were they ones that were smiling!

Unique Writing Prize – Autumn 2010

Posted By: Richard White, 17 August 2010

 

Escalator Literature 2010

Take a giant leap towards your first poetry collection with this nationwide poetry prize.

Escalator Literature is not your average poetry competition. Prize winners will enjoy a year-long programme of support with their writing; mentoring from established poets; a summer school residential based at the UEA and support in making an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts bid.

Writers’ Centre Norwich will launch this year’s unique writing prize in autumn 2010.

The prize is open to poets yet to publish a first collection, and for the first time the Escalator Literature prize will be open to applicants from all parts of England.

Sound good? This is just the start; more details will be posted here soon. To be the first to hear, sign-up for e-news at the top-left of this page and we’ll be in touch.

“Thank you so much for providing me with a mentor. Thank you for all the wonderful events and opportunities to learn along the way. These were terrific days, greatly appreciated, always inspirational, and insightfully chosen. Thank you for help with our Arts Council Grant applications. The money has made a huge difference - made everything possible - and above-all makes me feel like a real writer. Thank you for willing us to succeed, and for your ever helpful, friendly, positive words and deeds. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” 09/10 Escalator winner, Martin Ungless.

Escalator Literature is an Arts Council England funded initiative and has been running for five years. Many Escalator Literature prize winners have gone on to find agents and get published with writers including Fraser Grace, Helen Ivory, Susan Sellers and Nicola Upson.

Find out how last year’s winners got on, and read extracts of their work.

Escalator East to Edinburgh blog - Tim Clare

Posted By: Richard White, 12 August 2010

 

Our next Escalator East to Edinburgh blog comes from Tim Clare, who is performing Death Drive, his brutally honest debut stand-up show, drawing, in part, on his award-winning memoir We Can’t All Be Astronauts. It features poetry, ukulele and true stories.

Take it away, Tim!

Tim Clare’s Death Drive – Some Snaps
12 August 2010, 12:30 am



So the talented Wasi Daniju came to my show a few days ago and took some great snaps of my frothing and contorting in the name of art. If you haven’t seen Tim Clare’s Death Drive yet and wonder what on earth goes on in that stuffy oblong room, these images should give you a bit of a clue about what I get up to. The show continues at Zoo Roxy, 7pm, every day until the end of the festival. Word seems to be getting around a bit now – my audiences are growing and growing and I really enjoy doing the show. My tech at the Zoo is one of the nicest, most charming, sanguine motherf*****s I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, and I think my flierers may be ninja wizards. I was flagging a bit in today’s show, mainly because my breakfast was an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Naughty Tim. Turns out if you binge like a jilted Cookie Monster, it seriously hampers your ability to prance.

In any case, I’m having a splendid time at the Fringe. MusicOMH gave it 4 stars calling it ‘deliciously, darkly funny… An hour in his company simply zips by and many I suspect would have been happy to stay longer, to hear more.’ Effing sweet!

Wo Shi Shi Ren
11 August 2010, 10:00 pm

On Tuesday morning, I grumpily slogged through the driving rain to set up shop on Edinburgh Fringe’s Royal Mile. It took me ages to set up the complicated camping table, and my graphic design skills aren’t up to much, so the sign I drew in black marker on the spot looked a little forlorn.

To be honest, I felt a bit shy. See, the original reason I wanted to do the Poetry Takeaway is because I thought it would be fun. People would come and order poems, then I and an eager cohort of likeminded wordsmiths would knock them out in ten minutes or less. I’ve always really enjoyed doing speed poetry, mainly because it helps me get past that awful fear of the blank page – that positive but often debilitating desire to make every word count.

So I unfolded my cheap camping chairs and laid out my pens and paper and tried to affect a welcoming smile. And… people came. The first two customers were the chaps in the picture above – they were fliering for a show, and they simply wanted a poem about Arnold Schwarzenegger. 10 minutes later, and there they are, gamely posing with said verse. Want to know how they poem went? Well tough, you can’t. It’s an exclusive, a one-off. It’s theirs.

Next was a poem about rubber ducks and Russian dolls, which gave me a golden opportunity to pitch Dean Parkin’s brilliant poetry and storytelling show, Dean’s Dad’s Ducks (do go see it if you get the chance – it wasn’t just funny but properly moving). Soon I had been joined on the stall by a gang of Hammer & Tongue poets, and they made me look like a right pranny by taking to the stall like, well, rubber ducks to water. Dressed in high vis jacket and policeman’s helmet, Pete The Temp steered pedestrians towards the Takeaway, where poets like Ashley French and Michelle Madsen took their orders and set about writing their poems. We served a magician, a street-sweeper, I wrote a poem partly in Mandarin to a customer from China (and in return was taught how to say ‘I am a poet’ in Mandarin – a tricky little sentence that uses all four tonal variations in just four syllables), there was a poem about a dragon, a poem about a skateboarding velociraptor by Mark Grist, we delivered a poem to the Fringe Office after they placed an order, I got photographed with a little girl who is due to start school next week after writing her a poem about all the things she likes at the Fringe, we had a peculiar request for a love poem ‘for Susan’ from a sketchy guy who had his flies undone throughout, we did a street performance of each poem when it was finished, there was laughter, applause, even small squeals of delight… and at some point I realised that I wasn’t grumpy or self-conscious anymore.

I was having fun.

The Poetry Takeaway might be a bit ramshackle, and it might not look like much (yet), but I have to say it was the most fun I’ve had at the Fringe yet. The poets staffing the Takeaway were brilliant, and we got to meet a whole succession of people and have interesting, genuine conversations. It tells you a lot about someone by what sort of poem they ask for, and so in a very short space of time you have a series of weird and wonderful encounters. It kind of feels like how the Fringe should feel, you know?

The Poetry Takeaway returns this Friday the 13th, 11am-6pm, outside the Tron (opposite Starbucks on the bottom end of the Mile). It’s going to be bigger and better, with even more poets. We’re also planning some late-night guerrilla poetry sessions, where the Poetry Takeaway goes out on a delivery run and hits the bars and pubs of the Fringe, sating drunken punters’ hunger for bespoke poems in ten minutes or less. Table service! Look out for us.


Ed Fringe
7 August 2010, 5:24 pm

Wahey! I’m up in Edinburgh for my first ever Fringe run and having a lovely time. There’s mental amounts of stuff to see and thronging crowds and it all feels dreadfully exciting. You get quite publicity jaded pretty quickly, what with the mass of posters screaming at you from every wall and window, and flierers pitching for your patronage, but it’s also very cool to see so much art and comedy and music competing for such large crowds. I did my first preview to an audience containing several friendly faces, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, hopping about and screaming and gesticulating like a little monkey on elastic.

I went to Late N’ Live last night, the notoriously boozy mixed bill stand-up club that runs 1am-5am. I was expecting a bearpit, but actually the crowd were mainly good natured drunkards. I really enjoyed Australian comedian Sammy J’s musical turns. In-between the songs he bashed out on a keyboard, he had really artfully-constructed, wordy, complex bits delivered with precision and high energy. I bellowed heartily. Nice.

Oh, and I’ve stuck some new vids up on youtube. They’re in my vids section but I’ll post them here too so you don’t have to do too much work to see them:

Escalator East to Edinburgh Blog - Molly Naylor

Posted By: Richard White, 11 August 2010

As part of the Escalator East to Edinburgh scheme we're supporting 5 Live Literature artists performing at this year's Edinburgh Fringe: Tim Clare, Molly Naylor, Dean Parkin, Ross Sutherland and Hannah Walker.

You can keep up with their adventures by clicking on the above relevant names, but if you're feeling particularly lazy you can check back here; we'll be posting their latest blogs throughout the rest of the festival.

First up, a few posts from Molly Naylor who's performing Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You.


Family and mates (and Donny and Anne)
August 10th, 2010

Hello! I’m having a plum.

Life is good here at the Fringe. I’ve been having some family and friends time to remind me that life exists outside of this weird bubble. Ross Sutherland took me to meet his family and have a barbecue at their friends house – Donny and Anne. They were so lovely to me and I hope I didn’t ruin it by eating all the food in the entire world. I hadn’t eaten for about ten hours and so by the time Donny fired up the charcoal I was positively drooling all over his sausages. Smooth Naylor, smooth work (Someone called me Naylor in a review the other day. It was a bit of a highlight. I might start referring to myself like this. Naylor took a sip of her tea and finished her plum). Hanging out with Ross’s fam was a treat – his brother and sister are beautiful, normal people and they didn’t hand me any fliers or ask me about my show. I’m very bad at talking about my show. I need an elevator pitch. Luckily I have some excellent flierers, including Norwich’s very own Andy Bennett – part of Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre.

My parents arrived today, which is also lovely. I spent yesterday with Kim Hope, a brilliant comedian who took me to see some ace shows (Celia Pacquola and Tripod) and pimped me out to all her comic mates. She knows EVERYONE. I had to stand like a gormless twat while she told them all I was amazing. Friends are brilliant! Family too. It’s important to remember the wider world at a time like this, otherwise one could turn into a bit of a twonk. Hopefully I’ll be able to hang out with them without talking about audience numbers and writhing on the floor in tears. Wish me luck!

Right – I’m off to prepare. Have a lovely day x

Oooh, if you’re up here my recommendations today are The Harbour by Limbik Theatre and Flying Solos by Celia Pacquola. Both are funny and startling and moving.

 

Aces
August 7th, 2010

Hello! Good morning. I’ve got some tea and about five minutes spare which I wanted to spend with you. It’s all a bit mental here, in a good way. Channel 4 news came to my flat yesterday to film me for a feature on verbatim theatre at the Fringe (airs tonight on the news, unless something more newsworthy happens. I can’t imagine this for a moment), then I had me first preview (all good, lots of lovely audience), then I saw a bunch of shows.

I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of banter with the Channel 4 man. It didn’t work. He was nice, but I think TV people are sometimes baffled by theatre people. He filmed me for a bit and then went ‘that’s actually okay. I thought it was going to be massively shit’. Huzzah! I tried to offer him a look at Broken Music (Sting’s autobiography – it was here when we arrived), but he just shook his head. He was a proper person, and could tell that I am not. But it was still cool, and maybe I’ll be on telly.

I saw some shows! I saw some shows! Dean Parkin’s DEAN’S DAD’S DUCKS is so, so, ace and brilliant. It’s funny and interesting and honest and moving. I highly recommend it. Tim Clare’s DEATH DRIVE, although I’ve seen it six times (we did previews together) is still one of my favourite stand-up shows ever. I also saw Ross Sutherland’s THE THREE STIGMATA OF PACMAN the day before. Oh Ross. If you haven’t seen him perform, I think you’d like him. He’s a beautiful, shambolic human being and his show is lovely and weird and surprising. He told me the story of him arriving in Edinburgh the day before – he dropped his iphone onto the railway tracks at the station and ended up being lowered onto the track by his legs by a kindly (?) conductor. He definitely almost died.

I’ve finished my tea. I think that’s it from me. Yesterday I saw all my friend’s shows, now I’m going to check out some other stuff. Thanks for coming to see me! It’s been nice. x
Edinburgh – Hullo!
August 4th, 2010 | 3 comments

Hello! I apologise in advance for my overuse of exclamation marks. I’m excited, bordering on crazed. Welcome to my Edinburgh Fringe Festival Blog. A short post now, and then I need to get stuck in to real life…

We arrived (myself and Producer Sarah) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last night, ready for a month of performing, drinking, seeing stuff, and possibly going a bit mad (everyone says this is inevitable).

Our flat is good. It comes with Sting’s autobiography – Broken Music. No, I don’t know what this means either. I have promised P.S. nightly readings from Broken Music. She’s happy about this, in a way.

I am nervous. But excited. I promise this won’t be a blog in which I go on about my show, and my reviews, and boring stuff like that. I’ll talk a bit about cool things I’ve seen, dickhead things I’ve done, good shows to see, and maybe quote some Sting. Thanks for reading! More soon… x

Summer Reading

Posted By: Anonymous, 21 July 2010

Summer Reads volunteer and participant, Alison Pressley, has recently moved to Norwich having  lived in Sydney as a writer, publisher and editor. Here she talks about what she’s been getting out of our Summer Reads programme:

I don’t know what I expected by way of a literary life when I came to live in Norwich in September last year, but I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the verve and breadth of the book scene here. Since I arrived a new independent bookshop has opened in the city centre – now how optimistic is that in these straitened times? But I suspect – and hope – it’ll  thrive, because Norfolk  folk, I’ve discovered, love their books.

Through volunteering and taking part in the Summer Reads programme, I’ve been able to see first hand the enthusiastic participation of the public . I’ve attended Your Summer Reads: the terrific event at which Mick Jackson, Naomi Alderman and Nii Ayikwei Parkes read from their books and a lively book club session on The Tall Man at the Millennium Library; the very first book club session on The Lessons at Waterstone’s and the Australian writers’ night at which Michelle de Kretzer, Chloe Hooper, Kathryn Heyman and Steve Amsterdam read from their work at the UEA. I look forward to the book club session on The Widow’s Tale next month.

The Book Club session on Naomi Alderman’s The Lessons produced a range of opinions. Some felt that the book suffered in comparison to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, others were dissatisfied with the motivations of the characters. But we did all (well, nearly all) agree that despite some flaws it was a really good, page-turning read. I found it riveting, particularly its atmospheric conjuring up of a claustrophobic undergraduate world.

I thoroughly enjoyed the next Book Club session on The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper. Hooper was much hyped several years ago for her debut novel A Child’s Book of True Crime, which was sold around the world by uberagent Andrew Wylie for eye-watering amounts of money. This is a very different kettle of fish, being a thought-provoking account of an Aboriginal death in custody on a tropical island off Australia’s east coast, and the subsequent court cases. It’s an ongoing affair, and Hooper has plans to publish a sequel when all the dust has settled. As I lived in Australia for many years the book held no surprises for me, so it was a revelation to discover that the English readers of the book had been shocked and horrified to read about the conditions that prevail in Aboriginal settlements in Oz. Just one example of how books are at the very heart of disseminating information around the world.

My favourite book so far has been Mick Jackson’s The Widow’s Tale. I’m still trying to work out how a bloke managed to get inside the head of a woman of a certain age so well! Though, being that certain age myself, I’m not too happy with Adrian Slatcher’s description of her in his blog as ‘a cantankerous old lady’. It’s a terrific read, very funny, very sad, and his descriptions of that wild, windy north coast of Norfolk bring salty tears to the eyes of this city dweller.

I’m now looking forward to reading Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird, described as ‘an African whodunnit’. (The only Summer Read I won’t be reading is Summertime, because I’m not a fan of Coetzee.) But above all I’m looking forward to participating further in Norwich’s vibrant book scene. Ian McEwan apparently said recently, ‘Norwich has turned itself into a world hub for literature.’  He was right. 

Summer Reading is a Breeze

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 02 July 2010

Here we have Adrian Slatcher's final Worlds Literature Festival blog, looking at a few of the readings that took place during the week.

A big thanks go to Adrian for reporting various elements of the week in such fine detail. You can find his earlier blogs in Latest News, and can also visit his The Art of Fiction blog and follow @adrianslatcher on twitter. 

The "book group" has been reaching new audiences and in new ways this summer in Norwich with the Summer Reads programme, where a series of books have been selected and promoted through local bookshops and libraries. It was therefore a particular pleasure, as part of the Worlds Literature Festival, to see three of the writers on that programme invited to Norwich to read at the Millennium Library.



A large crowd indicated the popularity of this initiative, and listeners were treated to extracts from three very different novels. Naomi Alderman's second novel The Lessons saw us transported to a hot summer afternoon with a group of Oxford University students who are acting as reluctant babysitters to a young boy. As he climbs trees, pretending to be a monkey, they close their eyes and lie languidly in the sun. He climbs higher and highter into the tree, out of their easy grasp, and we feel that this ordinary afternoon is going to turn into something potentially more momentous. She leaves the readers at a crucial point in the story, wanting for more.

In contrast Mick Jackson's The Widow's Tale has the male author taking on the persona of his protagonist, a sharp, edgy, somewhat cantankerous old lady. It's a great act of literary ventroquilism. The third writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes, reads from his novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, set in his native Ghana. A dark, funny tale of an underwritten community, the listeners are immediately transported to a setting that few of us would know directly. What is impressive is how he makes few concessions to explaining the world he's discussing, but assumes his audience will understand.



Along with other authors reading this week, J.M. Coetzee, Simmone  Howell and Chloe Hooper, these books form an impressive and eclectic reading list.
 
Sex or Work
 
Sex and work. What else is there? We gathered at the new Thomas Paine lecture theatre at UEA for a special Granta night, where their two last issues, “Sex” and “Work” were given away in our goody bag – which one did you get?


 
Granta has grown in size, it’s a thicker volume than I remembered; but it’s also changed, seemingly less worthy, more sprightly, and this evening gave Norwich an opportunity to experience the new Granta – with a range of writers who have been, or are about to be published in the magazine. The theme for the night was the forthcoming Granta anthology “Going Back” – incidentally the name of my favourite Dusty Springfield song – and we were given a series of readings that made us reconsider our ideas of the familiar.
 
First on stage was Jon McGregor. He read from his latest novel Even the Dogs and gave a viscerating account of a particular new world order, which followed the drug crop from Afghanistani poppy fields to a vandalised phone box in an English provincial town.
 
Jon kickstarted an evening that also gave us Evie Wyld, reading a somewhat personal piece, Colin Grant, with his memoir about his father, and Granta stalwart Andrew O’Hagan leaving the audience in stitches with an extract from his new novel written from the unexpected perspective of Marilyn Monroe’s dog.
 
Fantastic as the readings were, the discussion afterwards was equally revealing. Granta editor Ellah Allfrey and Writers’ Centre Norwich’s Chris Gribble led a fascinating discussion. Granta has always broken down the borders between fiction and non-fiction, and each of these writers had, in some ways, confronted their own particular conflicts in the pieces they had written for the magazine.
 
 
Australians in Europe
 
The final night of readings as part of Worlds offered up three Australian writers. Chloe Hooper’s book The Tall Man – also one of the Norwich series of summer reads –  is an investigation into the death of an aboriginal man who died in police custody, and of the policeman who was the arresting officer. Hooper’s reading resonated with the dust of the hot, dangerous place where the incident happened.


            
Sri Lankan born Michelle de Kretzer read from her novel The Lost Dog and American born Steve Amsterdam gave us a short story from his forthcoming novel of connected stories Things we didn’t see coming.
 
All three writers offered very distinct offerings, yet were, as the night advertised, distinctly “Australian Voices.”
 
Melbourne is one of the first Unesco cities of literature, a status that Norwich is currently hoping to emulate, and it was particularly rewarding to have the opportunitiy to hear a range of very different writers from the other side of the world.  In a week when the Vuvuzela’s of the World Cup could have drowned out any serious discussion, we were reminded of how stories, both fictional and real, are able to travel across oceans and still engage our attention.    

The Civic Imagination

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 28 June 2010

Here is the third installment by guest blogger, Adrian Slatcher, looking at some of the topics discussed by writers invited to participate in our 2010 Worlds Literature Festival Salon.

By the third and final day of the salon, the different elements of the Worlds week seem to have come together somewhat. Attending writers have heard each other read, made personal connections and engaged in social discussions. The festival’s aim – to create a somewhat open space for writers to meet, discuss and debate – is being achieved. In between the second session and this one, Jon Cook reminds us, we heard J.M. Coetzee’s reading of a new story at the Norwich Playhouse (right). In this story, which Coetzee prefers to call a “lesson”, a circle in a field intrigues the protagonist – who asks whether it is a fairy ring? But there is no myth about it, it’s actually a threshing circle, a remnant of a forgotten agricultural past. There’s a sense of the failure of the imagination, where the childhood wonder of possibilities is replaced by a more prosaic truth. The wider moral of the story is that the only farms now existing there are facsimiles of farms – part of a story told by the heritage industry, where narratives are developed and set for the benefit of tourists. It is a reminder that the imagination is not purely the preserve of writers but can be co-opted for other purposes, such as the political or the economic.
    
In the final provocation, Zoe Wicomb (below), who had also read on Tuesday night, began to consider political or civic views of the imagination. She wanted us to think not only of “civic” writing as being about it’s value to a particular society, but about civility – writing that might be within a domestic “civil” context.

When literary historians talk about books having influence on society “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is sometimes given a definite example, but Wicomb wonders whether the sheer number of copies sold, as much as it’s content can explain it’s impact, for it had a reach that few other novels can ever achieve.



She mentions two different South African novels in terms of their message, Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country” and Nadine Gordimer’s "July’s People". The first of these had a clear political message, yet did it actually have any influence in the real world into which it was pitched? She mentions that Gordimer’s novel was debated in the post-apartheid period as whether or not it should be banned from schools, because of an unsympathetic black character. The irony of an anti-apartheid campaigner and writer facing a ban was a stark one. Although common sense prevailed, it highlights that good writers and worthwhile books cannot easily be put forward for a purely civic purpose, as the books exist separate to our daily realities.

Adorno, Wicomb reminds us, insists that the artist’s imagination is not constructed out of nothing, and that all books come out of some sort of empirical reality, which might just be more obvious where there is state censorship – but is probably echoed elsewhere. (For instance in what the “market” in the West expects from an Indian novelist, a Chinese novelist.)

Is it that the “education of the imagination” is actually not so different than “education” itself? Formal education is set up to pass on the values of a particular society or class. In this context, a creative work can be seen to be co-opted as appropriate educational material, yet this co-option is always partial, as the relationship is between reader and text, and that is a personal one. Reading creates empathy, between text and reader, and we should think of reading as a cognitive act – and, as writers, we are also readers, and use that act of re-reading in the revisioning of a particular work.

If there is some kind of formal relationship between a particular writer and the society within which the work is written in, it’s partly because of our limits of difference. We are all part of a particular society, our education, accents, place in society, there in our life, and therefore likely to inhabit the work.

Wicomb wonders if “reason” is some kind of stumbling block when discussing a writer’s imagination, for writing inevitably occupies a place of ambiguity where the reader is asked to question assumptions of empathy or morality, through characters who may well be flawed. When you read Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles for instance how would it be possible to assess it in terms of “civic value” where your sympathy lies with a fallen woman who has killed?

In responding to Wicomb’s piece we began by looking at how literature is “used” in education – for instance, through which books are read in schools. On the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” it is fascinating to consider how it is still taught in schools, not only in the US, but elsewhere. In the UK, it is one of  a number of books used in the classroom for purposes of moral education (alongside the Diary of Anne Frank, and Lord of the Flies.) Yet if it’s a “safe” text for British schools, it was also read in Australian schools at a time when education there made little or no mention of the indigenous aboriginal population. “To Kill a Mockingbird” may well be a book that is easy to assimilate into a school’s ethical curriculum, but it is also one of the most proscribed books in schools, particular in parts of the US.

The use of particular texts in schools for non-aesthetic purposes seems a particularly relevant example of the contradictions in how we “educate the imagination.” More recently, several of the Australian authors round the table have found their own books used in the school curriculum. In the US, local school boards, who may well have profound political, moral or religious expectations, have considerable power in deciding what should be read in school. There’s a scene in the movie “Donnie Darko” where a reading of Hemingway’s “The Killers” causes a minor scandal. It seems that literature in this context is expected to have a clear moral or civic purpose, yet few texts are compliant in this way.

Yet, if this is the way that the state thinks about “educating the imagination”, we should not be too critical. Within Australia, the studying of books with relevance to that country, rather than from the UK or US, is surely something to be grateful for. Yet this officially sanctioned view of the “value” of literature is inevitably focussed on short term gains – where a particular book can be set, read, and then analysed against a series of targets or can be used to spur a particular debate. Outside of schools, the book group may often take on a similar function, where an “issue” book can offer a more focussed debate – albeit away from the book itself – than a discussion on literary or aesthetic merits. Even the reading of a book like “To Kill a Mockingbird” cannot be seen as purely reductive, as the relationship between an individual reader and a particular text, might take much longer to untangle.



A book may be part of a curriculum for a particular reason, yet reading itself can be a powerful act of subversion, offering a relationship between text and reader that is unseen to others. Where particular books (for instance, religious texts) have been banned over the years, it is because of this relationship – books as conduits for (dangerous) ideas.

We perhaps expect in more totalitarian regimes for there to be a proscribed list, or an officially sanctioned literature, whilst missing that “good” or “liberal” regimes can also pile some pressure on literature to conform to a particular worldview. In post-apartheid South Africa requires there to be distinct narratives governing both the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. A recent memoir, Jacob Dlamini’s “Native Nostalgia”, imagines growing up in a violent township, but speaks also of it being a good life, for which he has positive memories. It’s a book that therefore disturbs the “official” narrative. It also takes us back to a theme from earlier in the week, of the difference between books that extend the imagination, and those that are limited to preconceived expectations.

Many of the writers also work within universities, and on creative writing programs, and there is clearly some power in the ability to be able to set curriculums and introduce books into the classroom or lecture hall. Should more attention be given to the role of reading within the creative writing course? For we not only read our own, and other student’s works, but usually a whole series of other books – which may be chosen for a number of reasons. Being writers, we value reading, yet perhaps don’t always think too much about why we do, or what makes us recommend a particular text to a friend or student.

In summing up this final session, we came back to the idea of the “imagination” and the language with which we talk about it. The romantics certainly had a language to do so, but in a more rational age, are we lacking that lexicon?

In going round the table, everyone at the salon had the opportunity for some final thoughts. The week had begun with us talking about stories as existing beyond what we write – indicating that the imagination is innate in us all. We’d then considered research into the brain, and how as we get to know more about the way we think, we also value the power of our imagination. The best books provide an “enhanced environment” where the reader develops their own relationship with the text, stretching their imagination. Yet books are published as commodities, are constructions within a particular society. That relationship between society and writing is a problematic one, but not without its merits. If books struggle onto the school curriculum because of some kind of “moral purpose” to be found within them, they also exist beyond their official role through their ambiguity, and yes, their imaginative reach.  

We seemed to talk mostly about novels, though, perhaps pointedly, the when talking about the “imagination” our examples tended to come from poetry, particularly the romantics. As the week came to an end, and taking in not only the conversations we’d had, but also the readings we’d heard, I began to think my favourite writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald for instance, could hardly be further from any idea of a “civic writer”, yet he is clearly a “moral writer.” In a post-religious age, at least in the West, I wonder whether we find something of the moral underpinning of our society, in the novels and poems we read. Formed by our upbringing and education, we are privileged to have access to an “enhanced environment” through the books that we have access to.

On our first morning, a writer mentioned the “luminous shock” that she felt on coming to England and seeing a copper beech for the first time; for she recognised it, and could name it, not from pictures, but from the books she had read. In this we see the essence of literary imagination, not necessarily to bring something fantastical to life, but to describe what we see every day and see it again with a sense of wonder. That our sense of wonder than can be transferred across time and space, simply through words, is the continued triumph of our educated imagination in a world that sometimes can seem reduced to the merely utilitarian.  

Scanning for the Imagination

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 24 June 2010

If the imagination is boundless, then having Maria (M.J.) Hyland (pictured) talk to us about neuroplasticity to kick off this second session of the Writers’ Salon, thinking about the reader in relation to the education of the imagination, was entirely appropriate.
    
Our writers’ neurons kicked in immediately, both because it’s a subject that many of us knew little about, and also because thinking about the brain sees science stepping into a writers’ territory.
    
Neuroplasticity refers to how the brain adapts and changes – and how particular parts of the brain do not necessarily do specific tasks independently. The brain is not only bigger than the sum of it’s parts but changes according to the environment. In laboratory tests, rats who are placed in “enriched environments” have more branches to their brain and stronger brains than those who don’t.

But in the latest experiments in neuroscience, it is humans who are the lab rats. Hyland gave the example of an experiment where three different groups are given direct instructions: to learn to play a piano, to simply stare at a piano and to imagine playing the piano. Scans showed that the group who imagined playing the piano had the same “lighting up” of parts of the brain as the first group, who’d actually learned to play it.
    
She talked about a whole series of other experiments that are being attempted by neuroscientists – such as Susan Greenfield and Colin Blakemore - who are beginning to increase science’s knowledge of how the brain functions. Hyland gives her own idea for an experiment that she’d like to see take place. What happens to writer brains when they write? What happens when we imagine?
    
In responding to Hyland’s provocation, the rest of the group had a number of observations and questions, including wanting to probe more into the detail of these experiments. For instance, several people had seen the video of two schoolgirls playing, interpolated with a gorilla, which people failed to notice because they had been conditioned not to see it. The writer, who is meant to see things, will inevitably wonder whether this is just an optical illusion or a more profound insight into how we perceive.
    
But though we were clearly stimulated by these scientific advances in understanding the brain, there was also some scepticism. How, for instance, can a person simply “stare” at a piano for five days without imagining?

It was mentioned that a number of successful novels over the last few years could almost be called “neuronovels,” imagining characters who are either damaged or have a different way of looking at the world, like the boy with Aspergers syndrome in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time or the character who has Huntington Syndrome in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Yet if these books are exploring characters through conditions that are only recently being defined by the medical community, are they not in some way “pathologising” what it is to be human?

Through history, writers have always created characters in the midst of some kind of psychic extremis, pre-empting scientific enquiry into the mind by years or decades. It’s no real surprise that Henry James could be said to have written “neuronovels”, when correspondence with his psychiatrist brother William James could provide the psychological underpinning for the nuanced characters of his later novels. It is the minute movements of the consciousness that you see in James’ novels which show a keen understanding of how our minds and emotions work. Proust, as well, is known to have read the notes of his doctor father.

If neurological science is now of such interest to novelists, it is nothing new, because novelists have been writing about these issues for a century or more. In this context, you could conceive of writers as creators of “enhanced environments” which do, indeed, “light up” the brain. Yet we were reminded that writing is not always about the novel. In films, plays and television, writers are working in a collaborative medium, where the finished work – with the various contributions of director, actors, and technicians – is not the result of an individual consciousness but of some kind of shared “social imagination.” In video games – once derided for their formulaic nature – new studies are showing that playing them does not “dumb down” the subject but can be stimulating instead. Games are no longer repetitive addictions like “Space Invaders” but complex multi-faceted environments and writers are increasingly involved as participants in creating the game experience, that can then be handed over to the participant, who has some power over the game’s imaginative content.

Yet although much of this is self-evident, I wondered whether we should also be asking a question about the importance of having a good teacher – for whether it’s playing a game or reading a novel, our ability as participants or readers to get the most out of it (to have an “imaginative experience”) is determined partly by how confident we are in our abilities. A poverty of experience may lead to a poverty of imagination, whether a human “lab rat” asked to stare at a piano, or a political prisoner incarcerated in solitary confinement without reading or writing materials.

If we are talking about the “education of the imagination” perhaps we have to be careful that we don’t come too easily to a consensus about what that phrase means, as our imaginations may well be constructions of our history and environment. For all the advances in neuroscience, science’s methods and results can seem a little crude, through the visualising the electrical changes in the brain following different activities, and then interpreting what that means. If the brain responds to an “enhanced environment” and an imaginative work is a good example of that environment, would there be a difference between a good novel and a bad one? We know, or think we know, that great literature is a stimulant for the mind – and perhaps don’t need the crude nomenclature of science – “lighting up,” “active brains” – to describe what we, as writers, already show some understanding of.

There seemed, half way through the discussion, to be a little bit of a split between those who approached writing rationally, and those who approached it imaginatively. Perhaps as creative practitioners, we need to make the case for the latter, regardless of how we get there, rather than conceding the argument to the rationalists and trying to deliver a case for the imagination in an inferior language.

For our second provocation, Nick Jose (pictured) asked us how literature travels across borders. In a sharp, short opening, he asked that we remember Randolph Stow, an Australian writer of visionary novels, who returned to his ancestral homelands in Suffolk in the late 60s, and who died earlier this year. Stow’s reverse pilgrimage has traduced, for now, his reputation in Australia, but Jose used it as an example of how a writer’s works move through time and space, and “seldom in a straight line.”

He spoke about China and the difficulties that country sees in matching its economic hegemony with a cultural one. If we – or they – are looking for a worldwide literature we see it in the rows of Agatha Christie novels in a bookshop in Shanghai. Agatha Christie – and other crime writers – are clearly “world” authors, whatever we might think of their literary merit. Like video games, detective fiction entertains us within certain comfortable parameters, and perhaps, limits rather than develops our imaginative reach.

I hadn’t realised, until Jose mentioned it, that the story of Aladdin is an “orphan” tale. Though seen as one of the key stories of the Arabian Nights, and translated and adapted many times, the earliest version we know of was when a French writer wrote it down after being told it by an anonymous Syrian traveller. Like Beowulf, another orphan text, it seems to be a significant story from our literary pre-history, yet only relatively recently was it assimilated into that history.

The way in which literature travels across borders and time has many different aspects – from what is translated (and this is often dictated by the market), to what is expected (a Western expectation of what Chinese literature is). We were reminded of how American literature took a long time to find it’s own voice, with writers before Twain and Melville echoing or incorporating the tropes of English literature. The importance of an “imagined” literature for America comes from America’s history – where the very idea of America predated it’s existence, and perhaps remains to this day. For South African literature, the imagination may be disabled by certain expectations of what makes a South African novel – yet surely, during apartheid, the state’s dysfunctional role was to propagate that disability. In the third and final session of the salon, we hope to come back to this particular point.
    
The writer and the writer’s imagination cannot be entirely circumscribed whatever the limits of the country (or culture) in which they operate. Their imagination remains singular. We think back to our first day’s discussion and to our discomfort at the writer’s role within an institution. Where the reader (or “the market”) has certain expectations, it is perhaps inevitable that some writers will follow, either out of necessity, or because it fits with their own world view, yet these parameters may only be ones that we work within. Publishers, governments, even readers may have some sense that writing should be “authentic” first, and “imaginative” second. The group seemed unhappy at the concept of “authenticity” to define literature’s value, for it may be used as an excuse to disable the imaginative response to a particular question. Although we attended the salons in between the various readings during this week, those readings seem vital to this discussion in many ways. An “evening of South African writers” or an “evening of Australian writers” doesn’t give us a school, or even a representative set of voices. Rather it foregrounds the individuality of a writer’s own voice ot even of a particular piece of work within that writer’s oeuvre.

Returning to Hyland’s initial thoughts  on neuroplasticity, it seems to me that creative writing is Exhibit A in any case for the imagination. Each text that we write or read is not just some kind of switch that “lights up” a particular part of the brain, but something that creates a more subtle interchange with the way that we think. We may look to define the imagination to appease a rationalist view of the world, but in doing so, we are not conceding the argument, so much as indulging it. Writers, fascinated as ever by the world that we both live in and attempt to describe, are always willing to adapt to a changing world. The imagination, it seems, is always more than the sum of its parts. 

Coetzee Rocks the House

Posted By: Katy Carr, 23 June 2010

Now suddenly it’s Wednesday and we are feeling pretty buzzy after last night’s event at Norwich Playhouse with Gabeba Baderoon, CJ Driver, Zoe Wicomb and of course JM Coetzee.

We started proceedings on a beautiful summer’s evening, with students and their families milling about for their art show down the road, and a sense of mounting excitement as the audience gathered and chatted outside as did we, waiting  in the sunlight for Coetzee.



Then he walked up to the venue, smiled for the cameras, walked around people with last minute glasses of wine and went backstage to say hello to his fellow readers before taking his seat for the first half.



What was great about last night was the variety and breadth of work. Gabeba Baderoon read first, a beautiful set of poems setting us on journeys of love and loss, allowing us to contemplate these big topics through sensuously crafted language which almost lulled the listener into the poetic landscape and which was received enthusiastically by the packed house.




Next came CJ ‘Jonty’ Driver, who, talking of a friend who asked why didn’t he give up and just accept that he is English (having lived half his life in England) he quoted the epitaph: old age has no country.

The atmosphere in the house was jolly and there were laughs as he read his poems, followed by quiet as some of the implications of his thoughtful poetry sank in.  His response to that question of his identity was very striking, and all of his poems arced in some way around belonging with some reaching back to the homeland; Jonty left South Africa having been detained for a period in solitary confinement in 1964 by the South African Security Service.


Then something completely different; Zoe Wicomb took to the stage with her striking, relaxed style, reading work from her novel which she ‘just grabbed from the shelf on the way out the door because I couldn’t find the one I wanted!’ This delightful style was echoed by her narrator –whose third person voice felt like first person and whose outlook was quirky, upbeat (widowhood means there’s more time to get things done – why be downhearted?) and involving from the off. The pace was fast, the writing and voice sharp and we clapped heartily at the end of what had been a great first half.


When we settled back in after the scrum at the bar, Coetzee took his place at the podium with a small smile. He read a short story, (not a new piece but virtually unpublished), that was vintage Coetzee. The story moved between humour, anger and pathos and he read with great expression, taking the whole audience on the journey of a young boy wondering what the stone circle on his farm means – could it be fairies? The young boy grows and eventually his father explains that the stones were used for threshing. The boy is incredulous; where was the wheat from; how was the land ever fertile enough to create it?  Trying to paraphrase Coetzee’s work is probably unwise, so I’d just advise that you try and catch this sometime – the story takes us thoughtfully round the issue of disconnection from the land, and the sense of civilisation almost going backwards.

Afterwards, Coetzee signed books as did the others, and the great atmosphere continued, perhaps as the audience contemplated the width, depth and variation in these voices.

A great evening and thanks to all the writers for taking part; I don’t think anyone who was there will really ever forget it.

Onwards now to the rest of this fantastic week at the Worlds Literature Festival...

Imagining “the Public Good”

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 22 June 2010

Fiction writer and experienced blogger, Adrian Slatcher provides an insight into the first session of the Worlds Literature Festival Salon. Adrian will be blogging about the Salons thoughout the week, so stay tuned!

When UEA was designed in the nineteen sixties, the architect deliberately created a sense of flow between disciplines and faculties which can perhaps only now be discerned as some kind of architectural memory, hidden in the blueprints of a contemporary campus university. This was one of the interesting points that came up late in the first morning of this year’s Worlds’ Literary Salon.

 

    This year’s theme is “the education of the imagination” and there’s already a palpable sense of it’s appropriateness just through the gathering of around 40 writers in the UEA’s council chambers. Though many of the writers there are based at universities, the relationship between institution and creative practitioner is one of the themes that comes out of our first morning’s discussion.

    Though we had started to get to know each other the previous evening, and some, such as myself, had a chance to catch up with those we had met in earlier years, like any good party, the salon requires a little bit of judicious oiling from the genial host to get things going.
    Our two provocations this morning came from Rukmini Nair and Graeme Harper. Firstly though, Jon Cook sketched out the thought process that had led to this year’s theme. A recent piece in the Spectator by Martha Nussbaum has argued in favour of literature’s capacity to educate the imaginations of its readers is a public good. For a room full of writers and academics, surely this should be an uncontentious statement? Yet Jon wanted us to consider whether this was always the case, for though Schiller and Coleridge may have based there views of the value of the imagination as part of what makes a civilised state, there are other times in history where this is not necessarily the case. Think of Nuremberg, Cook suggests, and I was also moved to think of the Kapoor Olympic sculpture, and the alliance of big business and political ambition that will make it happen. Going back to literature and it’s relationship to the state, will it always be tinged with irony?

Rukmini’s presentation took us on a tour of the imagination, her provocations stopping off at various unconventional places – not all of which we had time this morning to fully explore. If previous year’s salons have been anything to go by, we will come back to them, both in the formal space, and in informal discussion.
She began by considering the basis of what we mean by “imagination.” After all, in a world without written language or written literature, the imagination still exists. On visiting remote villages in India she finds “storyboards” and “story boxes” – which you open up, like a children’s plaything, to find multiple meanings. At the back of the story box is an imagination tree that is “mounted on the back of a cow – the giver of all good.” She finds puppets in these villages; archetypes of joker, death and monkey God. They’re immediate familiars in all cultures – I’m instantly reminded of Punch and Judy, and the dark stories told in the Punch and Judy booth, clearly not just for children. Our stories exist, she surmises, beyond the writing of them down, as does our imagination. In meeting Mr. Hu, a Chinese architect, Rukmini – who is a technologist as well as a writer - and him have a shared understanding of the distances between the “analogue” of the village, and the “digital” of the city – and how we need to look at the spaces between. Interesting for an architect, but also for a writer.
    Yet this is only one of her provocations. In the Mahabaharata, the figure of a Guru is ambiguous, not always doing what is morally right, a sometimes repressive representative of the state (of things.) In a university is the creative writing tutor also a guru with a statist agenda? Are, as a result, the University creative writing courses, by nature of the institutions within which they exist, creating “bonsai” writers? Cultivated, but out of nature.
And, if literature is a “state” or a “country” – how does it speak to its neighbours? Does it have a dialogue with them? A treaty? Or is it perpetually at war?
It seemed that our first discussions concentrated on some, but not all of these points. Rukmini had raised a number of “oppositional” forces: the city v. the village, the state v. the individual writer. In this world, literature is something negotiated, perhaps, even misunderstood (or re-interpreted) between the different oppositional points.

Following on from Rukmini, Graeme Harper wanted us to think about a more specific “role” for creative writing (and by implication “the imagination”) within our institutions. He took us back to the ancient universities, and reminded us that creativity was there at the very beginning, as places not just to study the world, but to create our understanding of it. The role of a scholar was cross-disciplinary – with a fluidity between critical and creative thought which only now may we be looking to go back to. Universities are partially established to protect their own “liberties” – of learning, of imagination, of action, outside of church and state, though linked to them, so surely putting writers into universities only to then separate them from the critical discourse therein, is in itself artificial?
    
Sitting on a train, Harper sees people on their mobile phones, browsing their Facebook page, sharing their experience via Twitter, and wonders whether this is the new model – already happening – that allows the creative and critical to sit side by side and mutually enhance each other. I’m reminded of China Mieville’s “The City and City” where two mutually exclusive cities are in the same physical space and exist side by side through a process of “unseeing.” Mieville has created a powerful metaphor. Learning, rather than being in a physical space, can happen between people, across disciplines. In the placing of creative writers – “imagination workers”, if you like – in the academy, we are not displacing their imaginations but finding some kind of utilitarian yoke for it. It is why some writers are reduced to describing their “day job” as some form of “alibi” – “I do this to earn money” etc. etc. – rather than revelling in the daily truth; which is creative people coming together, choosing to connect with others who share certain beliefs and aspirations, rather than remaining in isolation.
    In a room full of writers it takes a bravery to mention that writers, often self-involved, are not always the most empathetic of people in real life, and we should not pretend that they are. In some ways, it’s not even part of the job description. The empathy, if it exists, comes from the work. On coming to England a writer from another part of the world can have a recognition of place through seeing something – in this case a “copper beech” – that she has only read about, never seen, creating for her a kind of “luminous shock.”
    For us “imagination workers”, there’s almost a contradiction here. We sometimes despair at the short attention spans of web-surfing students who want to write long novels, but to read short Wikipedia entries. Yet, as children we all revel in the imagination.
Perhaps, I start to wonder, trying to pick apart the morning’s session, the “public good” of studying the humanities is literally that, state-sanctioned at certain times in society, and at other times dropped because it does not fit the pressures of the age. In a less than benign financial environment, there is no doubt that we are all under a certain “threat,” for the arts and the universities are developments of our civilised society as much as necessities for developing it.
Yet, for children, imagination, like play, is of immense value to their  development – later in life, society has, at various times, less of an obvious need for it. Yet the storyteller, the “imagination worker”, did not just appear with the renaissance, or flourishes in times of prosperity, but appears wherever humans gather together to reflect on their world.
Remember, the internet offers us endless opportunities to be “creative”,  in fact, it is the raison d’etre of the business models of such sites as YouTube, Blogger and Flickr; yet at the same time, those of us who have to “justify” the imagination to funders or institutions, have to use words and structures that are utterly utilitarian.
    The day’s final thoughts broadened out from the value of “imagination” to that of “knowledge.” What is that we need to know? We need to know that a bottle of water is clean, and safe, not that the plastic it is made out of is derived from oil. It is impossible to be like the young Gertrude Stein, frightened that she would one day run out of books to read, yet even if we can’t know anything we make choices on what we need to know to flourish in the contemporary world, in the same way that an isolated village would learn to know the medicinal properties of those plants that grew surrounding them.
    With the images of Rukmini’s archetypes – joker, death, monkey God – flickering in our thoughts, we finished for the day. We were, I felt,  a little less certain about the arguments that we began with. Over the rest of this week I think we will  want to define a little better what it is we mean by “educating the imagination.” As we slipped out of the meeting, the campus around us seemed keenly utilitarian, as buildings from that era always do, but a building, however well-designed, does not entirely describe what goes on inside of it, no more than you can access a person’s imagination from looking directly into their face.

Up-to-date news from the Worlds Literature Festival

Posted By: Katy Carr, 21 June 2010

There's still time to book the last tickets for Coetzee's event tomorrow - but please hurry; at the time of writing there's only six left!

Coetzee will follow hot on the heels of our Summer Reads event this evening, featuring Naomi Alderman, Nii Parkes and  Mick Jackson, who’s driving in from Brighton as we speak. You can catch Nii and Mick on Radio Norfolk later on this week; we’ll be doing a pre-recorded interview later on today.

Simmone Howell, the delightful Australian novelist will be delivering her teen book group session later on today, a book which was apparently a gift to write as the female larger than life narrator sprang into life in six months. ‘They’re not usually that easy to write,’ she told me earlier. If you read the book however, you’ll feel that joyful ease – the book is fully formed and charged with the narrator’s easy wit.

As I write we’re also hosting the first of the Worlds Literature Festival workshops, we’ll keep you posted as to how they’re going, and Adrian Slatcher is preparing his report from the first writers’ round table, coming up soon.



The first public event last night took the form of three readings up at the UEA Drama Studio. Poet Kate Kilalea (below left) opened the evening, striding into the spotlight to read from her Carcanet collection One Eye'd Leigh. Kate described how important it can be to prepare the listener, leading them into the frame of mind in the way an architect would with a winding driveway; putting the listener in an appropriate frame of mind. This she did and frequently, so her alternative love poems full of dirty little creatures really hit the spot, as did her new six part piece, which she read without once looking down and which left the listener wanting more.



Henrietta Rose-Innes (above middle) continued the theme, reading from her novel and a short story (featuring her own burrowing creatures!), whilst Neel Mukherjee (above right) closed the evening with a scene from his novel, A Life Apart featuring his character Ritwik undergoing a frustrating evening with his 80 something charge who drunkenly asks him to read to her and then releases tantalising tit-bits from her life, before going under again, leaving him eager to hear more.

Which is a bit like how I feel now – eager for more of this week’s opportunities – and to discover more about the tantalising glimpses we’ve had into our writers’ intellectual and fictional worlds.

View images from last night's event on our Flickr page

Worlds Literature Festival is up and running!

Posted By: Richard White, 21 June 2010

Yes, the moment has finally arrived. It’s that time of year when we welcome writers from all corners of the globe to partake in our yearly Worlds Literature Festival, a unique mix of public and private programmes, exploring the best of world literature.

Writers arrived over the weekend and are participating in the first of three Salons exploring questions around 'The Writer' in relation to the 'Education of the Imagination' – stirring stuff!

Although the Salon is closed to the public, we’re delighted to offer you a sneaky peek inside the chamber doors through the talents of fiction writer and experienced blogger, Adrian Slatcher. Adrian will blog all the juicy gossip directly to our WCN ‘Latest News’ blogroll. He’s a great blogger; check out Art of Fiction for clear-cut evidence.

As I write this, we’ve already enjoyed the talents of Neel Mukherjee, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Kate Kilalea (pictured above) at the Worlds International Readings event at the UEA Drama Studio, and there’s so much more to look forward to – see the event listings at the bottom of this post.

We’ll be posting photos, podcasts and literary musings prior to, during and after each event on our blog, twitter, flickr and facebook accounts, so keep an eye peeled and primed – something tells me this week is going to fly by!

Worlds Literature Festival event listings:

Your Summer Reads, Monday 21 June, 6.30-7.30, Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library, £2 on the door.
Readings by Naomi Alderman, Nii Parkes and Mick Jackson - all part of our Summer Reads campaign.

JM Coetzee: An Evening with Four South African Writers, Tuesday 22 June, 7.30pm, Norwich Playhouse, £14/£12/£10.
JM Coetzee heads a bill showcasing writing from his home country, South Africa. The three other writers are poets CJ Driver and Gabeba Baderoon and the impressive short story writer Zoe Wicomb.

Granta Readings: Going Back, Wednesday 23 June, 7-8.30pm, Thomas Paine Centre, UEA, £5.
Helping to celebrate the new volume of Granta Magazine, Andrew O’Hagan will read alongside Jon McGregor, Evie Wyld and Colin Grant.  

Australian Voices, Thursday 24 June, 7-8.30pm, UEA Drama Studio, £5.
Listen to three outstanding voices from down under read from their work: Chloe Hooper, Michelle de Kretser and Steven Amsterdam.

Worlds Film Screening: Disgrace, Sunday 27 June, 5.30pm, Cinema City, £8, member £6.
Come along and enjoy a special screening of the film adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace.

The Human Library

Posted By: Andrew Burton, 16 June 2010

Travelled by train yesterday afternoon to a bright and blustery Yarmouth to visit the library there and to see ‘The Human Library’ in action. It’s a simple but powerful idea which has captured people’s imagination across the country, thanks to the efforts of www.humanlibrary.org who are running events like this nationally. Instead of borrowing a book from the library, you take out a person and spend a little time with them, learning about their stories, their background, gaining  insights into worlds you might never otherwise have known about. 



Yesterday in Yarmouth, three ‘human books’ were available for loan – someone talking about Refugees and Asylum Seekers, someone who had fled Nazi persecution, and someone recounting impressions of their first day in Britain. There was a steady flow of borrowers while I was there, the numbers growing by word of mouth on the day; one borrower told me that a colleague in her office had just spent half an hour with the human book about Nazi persecution, and had found his story so compelling that she had decided to pop along during her lunch break to borrow him too! He must have felt well-thumbed by the end of the day.

Human Library events continue for the rest of this week across Norfolk; in Dereham Library on Wed 16 June, in Cromer Library on Thurs 17 June, in King’s Lynn Library on Fri 18 June and outside the Forum in Norwich on Sat 19 June . Writers’ Centre Norwich is proud to be supporting all of these events, in collaboration with the Norfolk Library and Information Service, as part of our contribution to this week’s national Refugee Week. We’re delighted that this project is touching the hearts and minds of people in extraordinary ways yet in the most ordinary of settings, your local library. You don’t need to book for any of the Human Library events – just turn up and see what books are available...

Reach out and read this summer

Posted By: Richard White, 03 June 2010

In case you hadn’t noticed, the sun is shining in a big way today, and we think the best approach to enjoying it is to sit back in your favourite summer chair and indulge yourself in six books of the highest order.

Yes, we have officially launched Summer Reads – featuring six great books by six great authors. They are:

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
Summertime by JM Coetzee
The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell
The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson
Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

You can get your copy from libraries across Norfolk, or if you’re anything like me and can’t bear the thought of returning a book (I advise you never to lend me one), then buy yours from our participating book shops across Norfolk and Norwich (keep an eye out for our displays in Norwich’s independent book shop, The Book Hive, Jarrolds and branches of Waterstone’s – should be good).

Reading them is just the start. By visiting the Summer Reads project page, you’ll find a huge amount of resources for each book, including author events and Q&As; reading guides; competitions to win signed copies of all the books and opportunities to get involved in conversations online and offline, with a number of  book groups taking place at literary locations around Norwich.

My colleague, Sam Ruddock, is raring to go and ready to discuss all that is book(ie) and Summer Read(ary), so why not join our dedicated Summer Reads Facebook page and, if you’re into Twitter (and shorter conversations), then look up WCNsam and get added value from your reading.

That summer chair I mentioned earlier could be taking you to some interesting places - from a small village in Ghana to 1970s South Africa; or from a tropical island off the coast of Australia, to the vivid world of student life in Oxford.

Wherever you end up, sit back, relax and enjoy!