Catching up on recent literary events:

On Sunday I went to Carol Ann Duffy's 'Shore to Shore' tour of poets at Caernarfon's Galeri, a really wonderful event attended by hordes, which I've written about on my other blog. It was a horrible rainy night, as horrible as rainy nights can be in this part of North Wales (I'm looking out at the trees whipping around and the rain batting on my window just now), but nothing could damp this event, and it was a bright and heartening two hours in the midst of our depressing political situation.
Information about the tour can be found here.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the launch in Southport for Carys Bray's new novel, The Museum of You. After a walk on the immense beach, which I had never been to before - the sea so far away you could hardly see it - I turned up at Broadhurst's bookshop with beach mud on my shoes and splashed on my trousers. The event was lovely. The Museum of You is the story of a young girl who knows nothing about her dead mother since her grieving father won't talk about her, and who tries to piece together her mother's life in a 'museum' of objects stored in the spare room. The book sounds wonderful and Carys made the evening even more special with little gift bags containing objects featured in the novel, and cakes decorated with their shapes. Broadhurst's Bookshop also did an impressive and apt window display.

At the beginning of June I was in London at another launch, that of my long-time colleague Jane Rogers for her new novel, Conrad and Eleanor. Another lovely evening, this time in Hatchard's in Piccadilly: it was a hot evening and there was prosecco (my favourite!) and a super reading from what looks like a really very impressive novel about the effects of time on a marriage.

Really looking forward to reading both books.

Chrissie Gittins and Tessa Hadley

On Friday evening Chrissie Gittins launched her wonderful new collection of stories, Between Here and Knitwear (Unthank), a lovely event upstairs in the cosy central-London Rugby Tavern. I first met Chrissie when she came to read at Manchester Central Library with her then newly published first collection, Family Connections, and when my own first collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was forthcoming from the same publisher, so of course we got chatting and have kept in touch ever since. And so of course on Friday I jumped on the train for the launch of the new book.

It's a series of linked stories that chart the life of one woman, Christine, from early childhood to middle age, and the shifts in her relationship with her parents as she grows and then as her parents become vulnerable and aged. The stories are steeped in the kind of physical detail and psychologically acute observations that will have readers exclaiming with recognition, and Chrissie has a beautifully subtle and dry wit.

I loved Mrs Marshall. We all did. We wanted to be her. We wanted to be married to her husband and donate our wedding trousseaus to the school play. We wanted a weekend cottage in Troutbeck, and to start our teaching careers in Wales.

Chrissie read beautifully, and we were all entranced. I read the book all the way back on the train, looking up only once, at Stoke-on-Trent, to see that, without my noticing, it had been snowing. It's a book you'll want to read in one sitting.

Two days earlier I was at Edge Hill University, hearing Tessa Hadley read and talk. She read an early short story and an extract from her latest novel, The Past, and talked very interestingly about the difference between novels and short stories, and the different strategies and mindsets needed for each. She didn't think there was any point in getting indignant about the way short stories don't sell, she said: the fact is that short stories are a 'strenuous' read, requiring a particular kind of focus of attention, and people prefer the immersive experience that novels can provide. Nevertheless, she said, stories are a joy to read and write, and for the writer a wonderful medium in which to hone your linguistic skills. Afterwards I reminded Tessa that we had met in Cardiff at the launch of Power, an anthology published by Honno, in which we both had stories, and she told me that that had been her very first short story - she's come a long way since!

Catch up

The family issues keep on distracting me from my blogs (and from writing - which is dreadful!), so some of the interesting events I've attended this autumn just haven't got reported here. One thing I should have blogged about (I did take notes, because I intended to) was a Manchester Literature Festival reading with Martin Amis and Nick Laird, which I did find very interesting. (It was one occasion when Amis proudly called himself a Philo-Semite, for which he's since been criticised on the grounds that it's racist to characterise a people as all good, as well as to characterise it as all bad). Amis is always very listenable to, and of course his prose is vivid and rhythmically flawless. I was very struck, too, by the sense of a lot of what Nick Laird said about literature and writing.

Another was the launch of Carys Davies's superb second collection of short stories from Salt, The Redemption of Galen Pike, a lovely evening held at Daunt Books in Holland Park. Many of the stories in this book have won or have been long- or shortlisted in major awards, such as the V S Pritchett and Society of Authors awards, the Manchester Writing Prize, the EFG Sunday Times award and others. Carys's writing is taut and vivid, with both a mythic quality and a touching insight into human frailty. I strongly recommend her book.

I thoroughly enjoyed two very recent events. Last week at Edge Hill University, C D Rose and Edge Hill Prize winning Kevin Barry gave truly stimulating readings. C D Rose's book, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (Melville House), is a brilliant compendium of talented but failed writers (and a rebuttal of the assertion that 'talent will out'). Fact or fiction? Well, it's not immediately clear, and that of course is the point: if, through external circumstances, you disappear from literary history or never make it in the first place, you may as well be fictional. Innovatively, before he read the first entry, C D Rose read the Index of the book, which sounded like a long poem and was both hilarious and moving. Kevin Barry read 'Fjord of Killary', a story from his Edge Hill Prize winning collection Dark Lies the Island (Cape). His reading was so animatedly brilliant that I wondered if the story would stand up to my scrutiny when I read it on the page, but it certainly did - as did all the others in his wonderful collection.

Here are the two writers in the Q & A afterwards with convener Ailsa Cox (C D Rose on the left and Kevin Barry in the centre):

The next evening I was at Halle St Peter's in Manchester, the beautiful Ancoats church with its elegant airy interior converted as a rehearsal space for the Halle orchestra. The event I was attending was part of the project Different Spirit, a series of installations and events curated by Helen Wewiora and produced by Julie McCarthy, Creative Director of 42nd Street, a charity working with young people under stress. This was a musical event, titled Local Recall, and the culmination of work done by Open Music Archive artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White with the 42nd Street young people in the Ancoats area and Unity Radio. Simpson and White work to explore the potential of public domain material, and for this project they revisited the free art, music and lectures that were available to the Ancoats public from the late 1880s. Using piano player rolls, the young people had remixed, cut up, looped and re-assembled Victorian popular songs, and this was what we first heard when we arrived and milled about the church - very impressive. Then there were two live piano recitals: first, musician Serge Tebu took Victorian popular songs as starting points for jazz improvisation and then recent RNCM graduates Calum McLeod and Liam Waddle played new music they had composed using the remixes made by the 42nd Sreet young people - really quite stunning.

 Finally, after the break, we saw a breathtaking film made by Simpson and White using out-of-copyright footage and making haunting visual connections between the inner workings of a player piano, Edwardian mill scenes, and mid-twentieth-century Ancoats streets. The film was accompanied by a live sound track specially commissioned from Graham Massey, founding member of 808 State, composed and played by him on the night using exclusively 1990s technology. A really startling and moving evening, which the large audience greatly appreciated.

Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White talk about the project.

Launch of Emma Unsworth's Animals and the question of clothes

I don't think I've ever been to such a well attended launch as Emma Unsworth's last night at Waterstone's, Deansgate, for her new novel, Animals (Canongate)

Emma warned us beforehand that the book was 'filthy', and the extract she read didn't disappoint in terms of anarchy and bad behaviour. Animals comes recommended by Caitlin Moran who calls it 'Withnail with girls', but Emma reckons her best recommendation comes from her mum who told her dad, when he said he wanted to read it, 'No, you don't want to read it, Frank.'

Emma had generously invited others to read at the event, Robert Williams, Greg Thorpe, chef Mary Ellen McTague, and the music-and-words duo Les Malheureux that is writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon, so it was a very full and buzzy evening.

Those who know me well will know that I'm bonkers about clothes and dressing up - though I know you wouldn't think it, the old rags I wear most of the time (since I spend most of my time writing), and pop out to the shops in, or the samey safe things I pull on at the last minute to go out because I've been writing up to the wire and just haven't got time or space in my head to think creatively about clothes. As a result, my wardrobe and trunk and many drawers are stuffed full of charity-shop finds I hardly ever wear. Anyway, I'm in that haitus where you've come to the point in a big project when you can't go any further with it as you're waiting for your first readers' comments, and you don't want to push it from your head by working on other things (and don't have the creative energy anyway). Sometimes I spend such periods sending stories off, but I have no stories I'm ready to let go without further work, so yesterday I actually did some wardrobe sorting (for the first time in a long, long time) and discovered clothes I'd long forgotten about, but which seem to have come back into fashion! Trouble is, though, of course, nationwide or global fashion is never the same as the look sported by particular groups, and quite often, as last night, it's so long since I've been out that I've no idea what people are wearing. So off I went safely dressed in black leggings and leather jacket, most curious to see what folks were wearing to literary dos nowadays. And it turned out: anything and everything. There was Emma looking like Marilyn Monroe in her little black dress, there was novelist Jenn Ashworth in the most glorious fuschia-coloured tights, writer Maria Roberts with a fabulous bright-yellow jacket, and outfits from suit jackets to pretty dresses to sporty gear. 

I know what you're thinking: 'And as a writer she's supposed to be serious-minded!' But the two things are linked, in my view, the clothes and the literature. In the Manchester lit scene it's individual creativity that's all the rage.

Lancashire launch of Red Room

Across the moorland from Bolton to Blackburn last night, very appropriate for the Lancashire launch of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes. We thought we weren't going to get there in time (John drove me): we'd allowed an hour and three-quarters (thinking we'd have a coffee beforehand) but the motorway up to Bolton was jammed and at a crawl. Arriving also by the skin of their teeth were the other two readers, Carys Davies and Sarah Dobbs. Our waiting editor, A (Andrea) J Ashworth must have been having kittens! The library ladies were waiting too with very welcome tea and chocolate biscuits.  A lovely warm crowd had come to hear us read, and to hear Andrea talk about the book, many of them Bronte enthusiasts, including someone in a Wuthering Heights T-shirt, though there were people there too whose interest in the Brontes was newly rekindled. Two people told Andrea afterwards that they had been prompted by the event to re-read Jane Eyre beforehand. We had some wonderful photos taken by Derren Lee Poole, and with his kind permission I include a few below.

Here's Andrea introducing the evening and explaining how she suggested the idea of an anthology to the Bronte Birthplace Trust, and was then asked to edit it:

Sarah read from her moving story, 'Behind All the Closed Doors', about a young boy whose mother has died and who finds comfort in books in the way the Brontes did. She left us all moved and thoughtful (as I think you can see from my face in the pic!).

Carys then read her poignant story, 'Bonnet', about an imagined visit by Charlotte Bronte to her London publisher with whom she is known to have been in love, and concerning real-life letters that did pass between them. I think it must have been hard for Carys to read it without crying and many of us were choked up, I think.

Before she read Carys said that she thought Bronte aficionados tend to fall into two different camps, the Charlotte camp and the Emily camp. Here I am about to read and telling her that in fact I loved both when I was young, though maybe I did incline a little more towards Emily, as my story, which is inspired by Wuthering Heights, perhaps shows:

Lots of books were bought and signed. Thank you so much to the lovely audience, to the library staff, to Andrea, to Carys and Sarah and to Derren.

Red Room is available here.

Know where your venue is

Last night we had a lovely Red Room evening at the Portico Library with its original Victorian shelves of leather-backed 'Polite Literature' and founded if I remember correctly by Elizabeth Gaskell's husband William - so apt for readings from a book of stories inspired by the Brontes. Our editor, A (Andrea) J Ashworth, whose brilliant idea the book was, introduced the five contributors who read: Bill Broady, Felicity Skelton, Rowena Macdonald, Vanessa Gebbie and me. A fair crowd turned up to listen, including another contributor to the collection, Sarah Dobbs, and the library staff  hosted us all handsomely, putting on a welcome spread of nibbles.

Only one blip, beforehand: I couldn't find the place! No-one would think that I'd been numerous times to the Portico for other readings, and that once I even went there regularly for meetings when I was a judge of the Portico Prize: walking along Moseley Street from Piccadilly I went straight past it and was almost at St Peter's Square before I realised. Worse: poor Vanessa was dragged along with me: we'd met three hours earlier only just up the road in Piccadilly Gardens, to chat and catch up, so expected to be at the venue in plenty of time. In the end, because of my error, we were hardly early at all! Partly this is because we were still chatting so hard I wasn't concentrating, and partly because the entrance is round the corner in Charlotte Street - and pretty modest, too: it really is like going through a secret door and up a tunnelling staircase which then opens out onto a magic world, the glowing lamplit library. Anyway, all was well in the end, and it was a great evening.

Photography was quite hard with my (by current standards) rather rudimentary camera, since, rather than creating an overall brightness, the library has retained the cosy, peaceful Victorian mode of spots of light for reading by, but John (who joined us) managed to take some pics with it.

First Bill Broady read his story 'Heathcliff versus Sherlock Holmes' which features a couple on a first date arguing comically about the merits of those two characters.

Next up was Felicity Skelton, whose story 'The Curate's Wife - a Fantasy' is about an imagined meeting on the lonely darkening moor between Charlotte Bronte and a famous figure from history (I won't reveal who!):

Then Rowena Macdonald read extracts from her longer 'A Child of Pleasure,' a story of two modern characters based on two from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. I followed with an extract from 'That Turbulent Stillness', my story of a girl who models herself too closely on Bronte heroines, and finally Vanessa read her hilarious feminist re-writing of the famous chapter in Jane Eyre, which begins, 'Reader, I married him.' Here are  Sarah Dobbs (left), me (centre) and Vanessa talking afterwards.

Thanks so much to the Portico Library staff, to Andrea and to the other contributors for their great readings, and to everyone who came to listen.

On Wednesday I'll be taking part in another reading for the book at Blackburn Library (7 pm), along with Sarah Dobbs and Carys Davies. (No advance booking: just turn up.) I don't actually know Blackburn, so if I fail at first to find the venue, at least this time it won't be through overconfidence that I know where it is!

Red Room is available from Amazon, The Book Depository, etc, and direct from the publisher, Unthank Books.

Red Room reviews and events

Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, to be launched on Friday (1st November)  has already had some very nice reviews.

Maryom of Our Book Reviews Online declares: 'Reader, I loved it!' (Whole review here.)

Rebecca Burns of Sabotage Reviews calls it 'a fantastic collection of stories, a real treat for all Brontë-lovers and for those who simply love a good read'. (Review here.)

Michelle Bailat-Jones of Necessary Fiction say it's 'a provocative, emotionally-engaging and witty anthology.' (Here.) I think she must be referring to my story, 'That Turbulent Stillness,' in mentioning 'a contemporary Catherine & Heathcliff romance' (though, actually, the story is intended as an ironic comment on romance!).

There are several events lined up to launch the anthology. I'll be taking part in three of them:

* Friday, November 22nd at 7pm - Portico Library, Manchester: Readings from Vanessa Gebbie, Elizabeth Baines, Rowena Macdonald, Bill Broady and Felicity Skelton. Tickets available from the library or on this link.

* Wednesday, November 27th at 7pm - Blackburn Library, Blackburn: Readings from Elizabeth Baines, Carys Davies and Sarah Dobbs. Tickets available from the library or pay on the door. Details here.

* Saturday, January 18 2014 at 12pm-3pm - Waterstones, York: Signing with Elizabeth Baines, Bill Broady and editor A J Ashworth


and there's to be an Unthank prose event on Thursday November 7th at the Garden House, Norwich, 7.30 pm, to launch both Red Room and Unthank's Unthology 4. 

Rosie Garland's launch of The Palace of Curiosities

This is my first chance to write about the launch last week of Rosie Garland'sThe Palace of Curiosities, which won the Myslexia competition for a debut novel (I wrote about that here.) I must say it's weird going out when you haven't done so for ages (see what writing can do to you!) (how cold is it in the evenings nowadays? What clothes, in any case, have you got to wear - you can hardly remember). I must say too that these Waterstone's reading events aren't what they were - there was no wine, we were kept waiting outside the door to the reading room and then herded in all at once, but in spite of all that, so great is Rosie's popularity that the room was packed to the gunnels with a cheering, whooping audience eager to hear her read from the novel. And she didn't disappoint. Anyone who has experienced Rosie's performances as a compere will know of her energy, her arresting visual style and especially her witty way with language, and all of these are evident in the novel, the tale of the crossed lives of two unusual narrators, a 'lion-woman' covered in hair, and a man whose body when injured instantly heals. I'm about a quarter-way through the book: the characters are fascinating, and Victorian London is vividly captured, and of course the language sparkles like sharp-cut jewels.

Two launches

It's a while since I managed to keep up with reporting things right away or even at all, and here are belated photos of a launch I attended at the end of November, that of Jane Rogers' Hitting Trees with Sticks (Comma), her first short story collection after a string of award-winning novels. The moving title story here was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award; others in the collection were first commissioned by Comma's Ra Page for the science-based anthologies he has published, and previously, at a Manchester Science Festival event, I had heard Jane read her stunning story, 'Morphogenesis', about Alan Turing. Twice now I have heard Jane say that she isn't instinctively a short-story writer and only began writing stories on the urging of Ra, which, since this is the result, goes to show what a great promoter of short stories Ra is. Jane has also been writing for radio - when I was decorating in Wales, a wonderful play by her came on the radio - and 'Where Are You, Stevie?' is a story in four parts with four different narrators, written with radio in mind. At the November evening, Jane read an engaging and finally off-the-wall ghost story from the collection.

She was supported by Annie Clarkson, another contributor to Comma anthologies, who read a beautifully wry and ultimately searing story of two young girls and their elderly male neighbour.

 A week later I popped down the road to Didsbury Oxfam to hear my very good friend Livi Michael talk about and read from her new novel for young adults, Malkin Child, about the Pendle Witches, which was commissioned by the Lancaster Literature Festival. Livi talked most intriguingly about the subject of the Pendle Witches, and her book's original take on the story - the viewpoint of the young girl Jennet on whose testimony her relatives were convicted. And of course when Livi read I was entranced by the gutsy prose. Apparently the book has been as popular with adults as with teenagers, and it certainly went down well with the adult audience that evening.

Manchester Book Market

 Of course you can bank on bad weather if you plan an outdoor event. The Manchester Book Market, run by Comma Press's Ra Page, was held on Friday and Saturday, an annual event showcasing independent publishers. As well as market stalls there were over 60 authors - mainly poets, but a few, including me, with very short fictions - reading from noon onwards each day. And yes, the weather was dreadful, but spirits weren't dampened in the least - well we're used to it by now, aren't we? (I have to say, though, that stupidly I wasn't as warmly dressed as some my fellow writers - if I'd gone out in the morning beforehand I'd have known how cold it was, but I didn't). Above is Zoe Lambert whose story collection The War Tour is shortlisted for the Edge Hill Award, and below are Adrian Slatcher and Claire Massey. Thank you so much to Ra for organising the event, and to all the independent presses who keep literature alive.

A trip, a reading, a new magazine and some story chapbooks

Some bits and bobs - which is about all I can manage at the moment: I've had a lousy cold for over a week and am feeling pretty washed out. I spent Easter in Berlin, and the very first afternoon began to feel low and chilled; I thought maybe it was just the weather, which was very cold and drizzly-damp, but no, by next day I had a fully-fledged cold and a chest infection so bad that from then on I had to sleep partly propped up. But I had never been to Berlin before, and I wasn't about to miss out on anything, so I kept on going through the cold - the day we visited the horrendous former Stasi prison, it was blowing snow and hail - but once we got back to the UK I completely succumbed and have been good for nothing since. (Just hope I didn't give it to too many people on the plane).

As for Berlin, apart from the overwhelming history, there were some striking literary resonances for me: Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is a book that left a great impression on me when we read it for the reading group, and it turned out that Jablonskistrasse, in which the protagonist lives, was only two streets away from the friend's flat in which we were staying. I felt spaced out the whole time not only by a virus but also by the stunning intersection of past and present and fiction and reality.

I hope also that I didn't give anyone the cold on Thursday evening, as I wasn't going to let it stop me going to a significant event at Blackwell's Manchester University Bookshop: Salt publisher Chris Emery launching his striking new poetry collection, The Departure, and reading with Ian Duhig and Michael Symmons Roberts. Superb readings compered by Fat Roland in inimitable style, and a great meet-up with some familiar figures - writers Adrian Slatcher, David Gaffney, Sarah-Jane Conlon, Edmund Prestwich, Eleanor Rees, Steve Waling and Ian Pople - and introductions to poet Lindsey Holland and novelist Tim Shearer. A convivial drink in the Salutation afterwards, when I learnt from Adrian of his exciting new venture, a new literary magazine for innovative fiction - called 'New Magazine' - for which he is seeking material. And then, before anyone else, I left and stumbled back home to bed.

Every so often an envelope comes through my door containing the latest publications from Nick Royle's Nightjar Press - chapbooks, each containing a single uncanny story - and another came not long before I went away, this time two stories by Claire Massey. The uncanny needs sophisticated handling, not least to avoid that less-than-uncanny descent into the over-literal and the sensationalist presentation of macabre event either insufficiently or over-explicitly yoked to psychology, and in a whole imprint dedicated to the uncanny the results are therefore inevitably variable. But the idea of lovingly publishing short stories in a way that concentrates the attention on each one individually - the way they should be read, in my view - is a good one, and the chapbooks are indeed fine objects.

Robert Shearman's new book

Apologies for my continued blog neglect: I'm away from home a lot at the moment, and keep finding myself with intermittent and poor internet connection. Back home today to the wonders of wizzy broadband, and hot-foot from London (yes, really hot - it's sweltering!) and a super launch of Robert Shearman's third collection of amazing off-the-wall short stories, Everyone's Just So So Special. The launch was held in the amazing Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons - cases and cases of pickled animals,  human body parts, foetuses, etc. No pics, though, as they were expressly forbidden, which meant that I couldn't even take pics of Rob giving us a brilliant reading of the first story in the book, 'Coming in to Land'. Rob's previous books have won awards including the World and British Fantasy awards, and this new book looks every bit as cleverly written and thought-provoking and fun  - as you might indeed expect from a Dr Who writer.

New novelist from new publisher: Emma Jane Unsworth and Hidden Gem

About sixteen months ago I attended a meeting of women writers in Manchester, called in response to the difficulties that the increasing commercialisation of the bigger publishing houses is presenting writers, and with a view to discussing possibilities of setting up an alternative publishing house. One of the main movers behind the meeting was writer and teacher Sherry Ashworth, and it is indeed Sherry who has now, with her husband Brian, established the brand-new Manchester-based publishing house Hidden Gem. Their aim, they say, is to 'publish top quality novels by the best emerging talent'. Their very first publication, launched last week, is Hungry, the Stars and Everything, a striking debut novel from former journalist Emma Jane Unsworth, and last Thursday The Portico Library was packed for the book launch.

It's a high-concept novel in which the elaborate taster menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant triggers memories of the somewhat fraught life of the narrator-protagonist, twenty-nine-year-old food critic Helen Burns, and in which the devil takes a prominent role. A memorable first sentence, 'I was eleven years old when I realised what I wanted most out of life: more' sets the scene for a story of a dysfunctional family background with a dieting mother, anorexia and alcohol addiction, and tension between, on the one hand, the rigid codes of church and grammar school and an unexciting but safe  relationship and on the other rebellion and submission to passion. The devil, representing that last, and 'the ultimate bad lad', as Emma described him at the launch, makes vivid appearances throughout. Carried along by the story and the fluent and zippy prose, I read it in a single day. The themes are explored through astronomy as well as food (Helen falls for an astronomer), and there's plenty of tension to keep you wondering about Helen's fate. What's really neat is that in spite of her emotional troubles, sharp turns of phrase make her a feisty protagonist.

Congratulations to Emma, and to Sherry and Brian.

Jane Rogers and Rachel Genn

I haven't been going out much at all lately - for the first time in my life I don't particularly want to: when I finish actually writing for the day all I want to do is sit around tinkering with it in my mind and thinking about next day's episode: just waiting for bed, really, so I can wake up and start again...

But I couldn't miss the launch last night of a new book by Jane Rogers and a debate on the value of teaching creative writing with her ex MA student Rachel Genn, whose debut, The Cure, will come from Constable and Robinson in May.

 

Jane is a wonderful writer, and her new book, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press), looks fantastic. It' s set in a near future when pregnant women are mysteriously dying, and concerns a 16-year-old girl who, against the will of her parents, sets out to make a stand. You can read the rave Sunday Independent review on Jane's website here.

It was a Central Library event, and took place in Eliot House on Deansgate (where the library has relocated during the refurbishments) with its elaborate ceilings and stained-glass windows. The debate that followed the readings was interesting, Jane (who is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam) expressing the view, which I share, that you can teach grammar and structure and plot and character-building, but you can't teach a basic, and essential, feel for language.

Wisewords reading - how it went

Well, it was great! Great to get away from the desk and the WIP on Wednesday - even if it did feel like pulling off a big sticking plaster - to actually wash my hair and put on some togs other than the writing gear (which consists of my grandmother's old jumper [as featured on Dovegreyreader] and the kids' cast-off jeans and tops), and get on a train and actually WHIZZ down the country (a countryside wreathed in mist all the way, which was both disorientating and mightily exciting for your necessarily agoraphobic and home-stuck writer), and actually WALK DOWN SOME LONDON STREETS FILLED WITH PEOPLE! and GO IN A PUB! and meet up with two great writer friends!! Honestly, the headiness of it all!

And The Luxe in Spitalfields, where we were doing the reading, turned out to be just that: a really plush space. And what a great evening it turned out to be - a great audience and superb readings from the talented bunch of women writers I was lucky to be joining. Jay Merill, who organized and presented the whole event, kicked off by reading 'Little Elva' from her great Salt story collection, God of the Pigeons:

 She was followed by Catherine Smith who read us a striking story about an unusual house-hunter, from her new collection , The Biting Point, published by Speech Bubble. After a short break, Sarah Salway read from her wonderfully wry story collection 'Leading the Dance':

 and then Tania Hershman read us a series of her amazing science-inspired flashes, some from The White Road and Other Stories (Salt) and some new and unpublished:

In the final third, Susannah Rickards read beautifully from her Scott Prize-winning collection Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt):

and, since the event was part of a women's arts festival, I read my story about two sisters, 'Holding Hands', from Balancing on the Edge of the World:

And then I had a fabulous chat to the others and all the lovely audience members who included writers Debi Alper, Emma Darwin and Judith Amanthis.

Thank you to the others for their great readings, to all who came and made a great audience, to Jay especially for organizing and inviting us, and to the Wisewords Festival.

Next day I actually had a DAY OFF (in London)!!
Weird. (But fabulous.)