Another bright idea by Rainy City Stories

24th October

Talk of the Rainy City seems somewhat out of kilter today as bright sunshine streams into the new Cornerhouse Annexe through its floor-to-ceiling windows. The turnout is still keen on the penultimate afternoon of Manchester Literature Festival, where Rainy City Stories was launched two years ago. Having already submitted a poem to the website and taken part in one of the regular writing workshops run by the project, I’m looking forward to gleaning further Writing About Place tips from this discussion between some of the more well-known contributors.

Festival Director Cathy Bolton provides a brief background to the “interactive literary cityscape”, then hands over to the panel’s chair; author, Nightjar Press publisher and MMU lecturer Nicholas Royle. Nick is flanked by novelists Jenn Ashworth and Clare Dudman, and kicks off by inviting each in turn to step up to the lectern and read extracts of their work.

Jenn’s first novel, A Kind Of Intimacy, takes Lancashire fishing town Fleetwood as its backdrop, while her second, Cold Light, moves down the coast to Preston. Telling the story of two teenage girls, Jenn explains the importance of outside settings and space in this novel, which is due out next summer. Too young for pubs or clubs but too old for staying at home and keeping out of trouble, the characters take to hanging about in parks and other public places where they can drink and snog in peace. Jenn draws a link between the wildness of the teenagers’ behaviour and the wildness of the nature reserves (“where urban people go to look at grass”) they inhabit.

A little further afield, Clare’s novel, A Place Of Meadows And Tall Trees, is set in Patagonia, and her reading follows the story of Welsh settlers Silas and Edwin. Physical descriptions of the scenery play a big part in Clare’s narrative, with the two men trekking to a place where a perilous precipice overlooks a large lake extending into the distance. She describes a tangible tension, with man pitted against the environment, almost as if the landscape is a character itself. She also admits that perhaps she has an ulterior motive for choosing far-flung places as settings in her books: research provides her with the perfect excuse to go and visit!

Nick reads part of a novel that he is in the process of building up from a short story idea. The narrator, like Nick, teaches creative writing, lives in Nick’s house (albeit with a slightly different layout), sees what Nick sees and goes where Nick goes, which, in this case, is down onto the disused railway line that runs along the back of Didsbury Village. Nick instils in us his love of abandoned places – here the train track, but also dilapidated buildings: “It’s as if the story is waiting to happen; as if you disturb the stories as you explore.”

Each of the three writers is obviously attracted by wilderness in one shape or form, and the discussion which follows takes this as a starting point. Jenn finds wild places dramatically interesting because they are often where people get up to no good; Clare says wild landscapes allow for more interaction and give you the opportunity to let your imagination run free. From this, they discuss how place can be more than just a setting for a story; that it can also suggest a mood or a character.

All agree that it’s important to go to the place that you are writing about in order to immerse your senses and fully appreciate the sights, smells and sounds that can’t be experienced any other way (Clare recounts how, when researching a novel set in Greenland, she got lost but found her way back to the settlement by following the howling of the dogs the villagers kept, and how she wouldn’t have known this otherwise). By having this first-hand knowledge and feeling of a place, you can then evoke it and not merely depict it.

by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Sarah-Clare is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. She is the co-creator of Ask Ben & Clare, author of the award-winning Words & Fixtures, and regular contributor to Manchester Blog Awards 2010 Best New Blog 330 Words.

Maternity wards, public transport and murderous friendship

What’s the number one piece of advice given to aspiring writers?

Watch, and listen. Or, to put it more specifically: eavesdrop.

Countless writers have used the clever, odd, funny or even mun

dane quips of strangers as inspiration, but never as obviously as this. The Bugged Project finally brought the secret out into the open with a challenge for writers both new and established. Their mission, should they choose to accept it, was to listen out on July 1st 2010, and use something they heard as inspiration to create, whether it be poetry, fiction, scripts or flash fiction.

The result, the Bugged book, was launched in the packed Becker Room of City Library on Deansgate. It was the first official event of the Manchest

er Literature Festival, and despite it being a lunchtime, the launch packed out the oak-panelled room on the first floor, and not just with writers who had participated and submitted work.

A varied and lively audience was introduced to a selection of participating authors by writer Jo Bell, who made a very entertaining compère and kept the event ticking along at a cracking pace without spoiling our chance to appreciate the work itself.

After a brief introduction, several authors were give

n an opportunity to read their work. At some anthology launches, this might have placed the spotlight on the big and recognised names, but Bugged is different, giving as much attention to those who had had their work published for the first time in the book as to those more familiar authors in the collection.

It wasn’t just the writers who were varied in their experience. Having set out with a broad brief, they had taken everything from the funny, the outrageous, even the mundane, and transformed it into excellent writing.

The varied nature of the event meant there was never a dull moment, and the audience was kept keen by a tight timetable of three minutes per author. We were given a glimpse of the delights in the book by authors who proved to be just as good at speaking as they are at writing. From the regal Dorothy Burgess, reading her poem inspired by neighbours’ conversation, to the lively Cathy Bryant and her inspiration from “love, death and public transport”, each writer brought something unique to the event, including, in Jenn Ashworth’s case, a baby to provide punctuation to a story set in a maternity ward (presumably not a prop).

Eavesdropping had taken place in all manner of different locations, covering all manner of subjects, and demonstrated that the most unlikely sayings can provide inspiration. Alicia Ogg, a first-time author, had used a simple response overheard on a train to inspire a short story with an incredible, unexpected twist including a suicide. All this from somebody talking about putting pork chops out to defrost. Emma Morgan, on the other hand, spent the day at an airport and had turned the mission on its head, choosing to describe and invent stories about the people she had seen waiting in the Arrivals lounge rather than recount something specifically overheard.

Stories were sourced from all manner of daily events, proving just how varied life can be. Ian Marchant, an established writer who has run the Arvon Centre and written the travelogue “The Longest Crawl” about the ultimate pub crawl, offered the audience not words but music. His story detailed a couple coping with a twenty-something neighbour obsessed with Fleetwood Mac. Phil Williams, on the other hand, gave us the reportage of the neighbours’ teenagers trying to get into their house without a key.

The creations themselves were each as different as the authors. We were treated to a tale of murderous friendship from Callam Kerr, coffee shop dating from Lynsey May, humour from Cathy Bryant and Emma Morgan and tragedy from Alicia Ogg. It made for a very unusual event, breaking from the tradition of the book launch offering the chance for a single author to read an extended passage. The snippets stirred very different responses and made for light relief. A friend who’d come with me immediately purchased the book afterward and said he would have to spend the afternoon reading, since he’d been hooked by what we’d just heard.

It was an excellent way to kick off the festival, and a great way to spend a dreary Thursday lunchtime in Manchester. True to Jo Bell’s stated mission, we all listened very hard, and we definitely had a “bloody good time”.

For more information on the authors and to get the book, check out the Bugged site here

Joely Black is a freelance writer and author who writes epic fantasy and drinks large quantities of tea. Two of her books, The Execution and The Inheritor, are available as ebooks from Smashwords.