There’s a new BHD story being performed on Friday (24th Feb), as part of the Liars league Leeds contribution to the Sedbergh Lit Fest: http://www.sedbergh.org.uk/bookfestival/ will find you the details of the festival.
16th of May is National Flash Fiction Day…. which I’m hoping we’ll stage some sort of event in celebration of. In the meantime, remember I’m collecting flash fictions (100-500 words max) for Eden Arts’ Weekly Word. Submissions by e mail please, to BrindleyHD@aol.com (from writers living in or born in Cumbria only). Add a couple of lines of biography too. We’ll need that! If you’re not on the mailing list for Weekly Word - here’s a link to the opening flash (by BHD): http://www.newwritingcumbria.org.uk/the-monthly-fiction-flash-01/ You can also sign up for the newlsletter here.
Josephine Dickinson, well supported by local readers, read at Cockermouth’s Kirkgate Gallery last night (Friday 8th July). Josephine’s writing always astonishes me, and her reading style brings out the best in it. Perhaps because of her profound deafness, she gives to the silences between her words, an equal weighting with the words themselves. The quality of a Dickinson reading is one of silence. The audience holds silent, between words, between phrases, between lines, because, I think, they become aware of the importance of those silences to the words they are hearing. These days the short line poem, three words chipped off a sentence and presented as if it were a line of verse, is all too common, but Josephine’s lines are genuinely short. This is not chopped prose, but very few words laden with very much meaning, and often with unbearable feeling (what do I mean often? Almost always! – and I think the almost is doubtful).
So many of the poems are constructed, not only of short lines, but of seemingly simple words, often of one syllable, yet through these she leads us into ideas of great complexity, and starling poignancy, with images that are as sharp and grim as the landscape she writes about: the exterior landscapes of the north pennines and the Eden valley, and the interior ones of love and loss.
That reading style is not only a matter of silences though. It is the stillness she imparts, to the poems, to the audience, by her own stillness. In an era when poets feel they must bang the drum and blow the whistle and jump about the stage, Josephine simply gives us her words, standing, feet close together, like a column of alabaster, like a megalith, powerful, unique, herself. She does not need to distract us with whizzbangs and humdings. Her words are sufficient, and her motionlessness, like her silences, draws our attention to them.
Once again I was blown away by her reading, and left floundering for what to say ( I was MC-ing fcs!), yet full of the need to say something, full of the emotions her work evokes. Damn it, I might even try writing a poem again!
Others who read were Ray Moye, Hazel Stuart, Alex Morgan, Martyn Halsall, Dawn Bruin, Carla Scarlano, Martin Chambers, Ann Ward, Steph Newham, Elizabeth Stott, and Louise Shaw, who between them provided a rich soup of poetry and short fiction, that we gulped down with evident enjoyment. Thanks to all involved for another excellent Wax Lyrical, and here’s to the next one!
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I’m offering another series of 5 Facets of Fiction workshops on Thursday evening (fortnightly) and on Mondays the ‘long fiction’ group can take a couple more members . Both starting October. These will cover basics such as beginnings, settings, narrative, voice, & characters and dialogue. Cost £40. E-mail BrindleyHD@aol.com for more details.
The Mackwater Seam, a short story BHD wrote a while back, in what may have been an early version of Kowalski’s voice, was Highly Commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly’s fiction competition! Ain’t that nice?!
A Penny Spitfire launched at Carlisle
A Penny Spitfire is a fine novel – Cumberland News
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