Extravagant plots and luxurious prose...

So the festival begins!! We've had a great day so far, with the Bugged Launch at City Library entertaining a packed Beckett Room. This evening, Lionel Shriver; watch this space for reviews!

In the meantime, here's an interview with Barbara Trapido, ahead of our Dunker and Trapido event on Saturday 16th October at Waterstone's Deansgate, by freelance writer and friend of MLF Katie Popperwell.

Barbara Trapido is one of those rare novelists whose books I anticipate with the kind of slavering eagerness usually reserved for the Topshop sale and my grandmother’s almond cake. Zealous devotion is typical of Trapido’s fans, for whom her extravagant plots and luxurious prose elicit an indulgent pleasure seldom equalled.

Her latest, Sex and Stravinsky is an incredible tale of two families whose fates are linked by a beautiful mysterious stranger. Prodigious Australian Caroline tries to be the perfect wife and mother to her husband Josh and daughter Zoe, but her icy perfection is not enough to secure the love of her ghoulish mother from whose shadow she can’t escape. The family live in a converted bus; Josh teaches mime in Bristol and still dreams of his lost love Hattie, Zoe is obsessed by ballet books and dreams of dance lessons, only to find a kindred soul on a French exchange trip from which she may not return. Meanwhile, Hattie is writing girls ballet books from her house on the east coast of Africa, living with her overbearing husband Herman, her belligerent daughter Cat and the mysterious Jacques, who has travelled though Mozambique and Senegal to Milan and back to his origin, only to become the object of Cat’s uncontrollable obsession.

Trapido weaves a gossamer-light web of lost lovers, strange coincidences, missed opportunities and stolen identity that borders on the baroque, but out of this joyous cacophony arises clarity of form and purpose that throws into relief the joys and struggles of living in a global society.

Unlike most writers’ who employ complex plot archaeology, Trapido is not a planner. She is remarkably unselfconscious when discussing her writing process, and puts one in mind of a painter more than a writer as she talks about the organic emergence of themes in terms of light and colour and rhythm.

“I know it does seem to be that my plots have become more intricate and circular. I do everything very intuitively but when I read it now I see that there are these repeating and interwoven themes. I suppose there is some kind of spider’s web in the back of my head that I’m not aware of. I just rather instinctively weave themes into my work, and I always think it’s kind of like getting little presents, that perhaps drop into my lap on exactly the right day.”

“What happens is I write in a staring-into-the-dark way and after a while I start noticing things about the text, that there is some sort of story between the lines. At some point I start to questions things like; why is everything happening in threes? Or why is everyone always eating? Or why is everyone wearing green? Or why do I always describe that person’s feet? And then after a while I start to see the threads and understand what is happening."

Trapido’s last novel Frankie and Stankie was published in 2003 and tells the story of two sisters growing up in South Africa in the 1950s. It stood in stark contrast to her other novels, being linear, tightly focused and politically weighty in comparison. That book was cut from a different cloth, but now Trapido insists that she never meant it to be a novel at all.

“I called it a memoir, but my editor convinced me to publish it as an autobiographical novel. Because I’m sort of a wimp and I trust her I said OK but in fact it doesn’t read like a novel and that’s because the only rule I had was only to use things that had happened in real life. I just gave my sister and I different names and wrote it up in the third person, not because I was trying to hide the fact that it was my life story but because I thought people might find it boring.”

“What Frankie and Stankie did do for me is it brought back my South African history that I’d so long shut away. It had always come naturally to me to write as an English person which I thought I was, then when apartheid came to an end I suddenly had a sort of feeling that I was allowed to go and look at that again and shore it up a bit. And I think that has stayed with me and worked its way into Sex and Stravinsky.”

There are moment in Sex and Stravinsky that recall the political gravity present in Frankie and Stankie, but it also heralds a return to her trademark flamboyantly elaborate storytelling of the earlier novels like Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) and Juggling (1994). Her ability to segue seamlessly between sharp political satire and ruminations on vogue dress patterns without drawing breath is very much in evidence.

“Some people think I’m sort of a show off but I don’t plan it. I’m just quite talky and one minute I’m discussing Yeats or the Bible or something and it all sort of weaves its way into the book and the next minute it’s something else."

“For example, I noticed when I was writing Juggling that in a way I was having a conversation with Shakespearean comedy. As usual the idea presented itself before I realised what I was doing, and then when I brought my front brain to bear I thought aha! It’s got to go with energy and symmetry and that’s the thing about comedy that leaves us so upbeat even though the stories can be about really gruesome things. You leave felling upbeat because of all the energy and balance and acrobatics, it’s like a tightrope walk really. Once I was conscious of that I thought there’s no reason why I can’t stylise the ends if I want to. I can be quite brave and pair people off, and play musical chairs, swop people around if I like. It makes some people cross and sneery because it’s not like everyday realism, but it’s a kind of theatrical convention and I think of the novel as a kind of theatre anyway.”

“Sex and Stravinsky grew out of a love of girls’ ballet books when I was little, and an obsession I had at the time about the ballet Russe, and also a book about Stravinsky I had just read, then I saw an exhibition of Picasso’s costumes for the Ballet Russe. I love the Pulcinella ballet and the music”

“All that stylising, and I suppose the new world theme, partly has to do with the preoccupation I had with how scary our lives are now that everything is so global and that people’s lives go on these very long and unpredictable trajectories. Writing Frankie and Stankie made me very aware of how very much that happens in new world societies, immigrant societies.”

“I did notice there was a lot about masks. You can’t express emotion with a mask so you have to do it with gesture, and that sort of stylising fascinated me, so I think I was in a way trying to stylise the book as a sort of echo of that. Also the mask has got something to do with confused identities, and that’s another thing about modern life, we’re all terribly culturally mixed and life is more exciting but it’s also more insecure."

Sex and Stravinsky should be exhausting, but Trapido’s expert elicitation of the reader’s desire to piece the puzzle together is worthy of master detective fiction and, like the most accomplished of ballet dancers, the effort is invisible. What’s more, her willingness to deliver a gratifying ending ensures that you close the book with the snug feeling delivered only by a satisfyingly ambitious, successful and ever so slightly ridiculous novel.

John Siddique talks poetry

Here's a little snippet of John Siddique talking about Postcards From Manchester, which if you read our review on here, went very well indeed!

Postcards from Manchester: Catching up with award-winning poet John Siddique from Catherine Teague on Vimeo.

Kirsty Young (Digital Marketing Assistant)

CK Williams: distinguished yet unassuming

CK Williams’ poetry is lyrical, elegant and powerful. A National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at his native New Jersey’s Princeton University.

During a literary career spanning some forty years, Williams’ attention has regularly turned to the foremost issues of the day. Among a remarkable range of themes, his early verse offers a commentary on the tragedy of the Vietnam conflict and, closer to home, the struggles of the civil rights movement. While continuing to address such social topics, his later work leans towards the personal, exploring the subtleties of human relationships with an illuminating eye.

The understated Martin Harris Centre is an excellent venue for tonight’s reading, as Williams is perhaps the most distinguished, yet unassuming writer participating in this year’s Manchester Literature Festival. Opening with poems from the collections Tar and The Vigil, Williams gives an account of the moment he realised that he wanted to express himself through poetry, ‘leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper,’ as captured in ‘My Mother’s Lips’. The apocalyptic ‘Storm’ which follows offers a chilling vision of the impact of global warming, while the unlikely grace of the middle-aged woman depicted in ‘The Dance’ draws on a lighter moment of reflection.

Williams’ delivery is warm and full of character. Noted for his unusually long, prose-like verse, his reading brings the story within each poem flashing into life. Adept at placing the listener directly into a scene, ‘The Singing’ and the stunning ‘This Happened’ prove to be particular highlights.

Concluding with poems from his most recent collection, Wait, a brief round of questions enables the audience to learn a little more about the man himself. Responding to whether he felt there was any subject into which poetry should not ‘poke its head’, Williams says, quite simply, ‘no’. His wry brevity speaks volumes for his passion, and raises smiles.

Affable and engaging throughout the hour-long session, Williams’ occasionally poignant verse never veers into the sentimental. Those in attendance leave the John Thaw Studio Theatre with a sense of having taken part in an intimate, stimulating and enjoyable event.

Official CK Williams website: www.ckwilliams.com

David Stedman studied English language and literature at the University of Manchester. He is a regular contributor to Manchester’s CityLifers music website.

Sophie Hannah hopes Kirstie and Phil would approve!

Next in our series of Q & As with writers who are appearing at this year's MLF is leading psychological crime writer Sophie Hannah, who hails from the not so far away Didsbury.

MLF: What are you reading at the moment?

'The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment' by Isabel Losada. It's the memoir of a woman who sets out to become enlightened and tries everything from 'Find Your Inner Goddess' workshops to colonic irrigation. I bought it because I recently read Elizabeth Gilbert's spiritual memoir 'Eat Pray Love' and absolutely loved it, and so I thought I'd try and read about other people's journeys to enlightenment. When I'm not reading crime fiction, which is my staple diet, I like to read new agey stuff. My favourite ever spiritual enlightenment book is Eckhart Tolle's 'The Power of Now'. I should point out that, personally, I'm not very enlightened - I still enjoy bitching about people I don't like and doing the wrong thing when it suits me - but I find the whole subject of enlightenment fascinating.

MLF: What made you want to be a writer? Who/ what is your biggest inspiration?

SH: Books have always been so important to me as a means of escape from whatever I can't control and/or don't like. When I started university, for example, I hated my course and just didn't want to be there at all, so I 'escaped' by spending as much time as I could immersed in Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries. Quite seriously, without Wexford I'd have dropped out and gone and trained to be a hairdresser. Luckily, I didn't, and so I was still at university when they started a Creative Writing course as part of the English degree, and from that moment on I was fine. But I wanted to be a writer, and still want to be, because I feel that there's hardly anything in the world that's as important as books. As Morrissey once said, 'There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more.' My biggest inspiration is real life - I wander about with my antennae permanently ready to receive, and I constantly see and hear things that inspire me. In terms of other writers, my biggest inspirations so far have been Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Nicci French, Tana French and Robert Goddard.

MLF: If you could meet any writer, artist, musician (alive or dead) who would it be and why?

SH: I'd be too scared to meet my idols - the writers or artists that I considered to be legends. Put me in a room with Ruth Rendell and I'd freeze completely, then worry forever that she thought I was an idiot. But, if I could guarantee the meeting would go well, I'd love to meet: Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie, Eckhart Tolle, M Scott Peck, Jerry Seinfeld - and I'd love it if Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp would come round to my house and tell me whether or not, in their opinion, I bought wisely. I should point out that I've already met my other favourite writers - Nicci French, Tana French, Robert Goddard, Val McDermid and many others.

MLF: What would you be if not a writer?

SH: A singer, or something in alternative/energy medicine

MLF: Do you ever get writer's block? If you do, how do you get over it?

SH: No, never. But I suffer permanently from an associated condition: housekeeper-writer's block. I sit down to write and then can't concentrate because I know a load of clean washing needs to be sorted and put into drawers, or we've run out of Cheerios. If I had a team of staff to run my house (or even a husband who picked up his own socks occasionally), I would write and write and write - I never run out of ideas, and I'm not scared to write something that's imperfect, which I think is what freezes a lot of writers in their tracks. I write something okay-ish and then work on it to make it good - that's always been my tactic. It's too much pressure if you tell yourself it has to be brilliant straight away.

MLF: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of?

SH: My latest novel 'A Room Swept White'. It's a psychological thriller, like my others, but, although it's totally fictional, it's based on and was inspired by cases such as Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel - women who each lost more than one baby in what they claimed all along were cot deaths, and who were then accused of murder by police and many doctors, on the grounds that (to quote one leading paediatrician) 'One cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, three is murder'. This issue of cot death mothers who might or might not be murderers is hugely controversial, and most people who take any interest in it at all have an axe to grind - they see it as a battle between sides, and are either on the side of the mothers or the side of the doctors. I wanted to write a balanced, non-judgemental book about this hugely important subject because it seemed to me that there aren't any bad guys here. The doctors are trying to protect children - although they might get it disastrously wrong sometimes, their intentions are good - and let's face it, a lot of children need protecting. And these women accused of murder are either innocent or have smothered their babies in desperation, often as a result of post-natal depression, or they have serious mental health issues - in either case, I don't think they can be put in the same categories as 'ordinary' murderers. It's interesting that many in the legal profession don't think mothers who smother their infants should ever stand trial in the criminal courts.

MLF: What do you see in your future?

SH: Well, my sixth psychological thriller, 'Lasting Damage' is out next February. Here's the blurb:

It’s 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she’s logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it’s for sale; she saw the estate agent’s board in the front garden only a few hours ago.

Soon Connie is clicking on the ‘Virtual Tour’ button, keen to see the inside of 11 Bentley Grove and put her mind at rest once and for all. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room there’s a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to take a look, he sees no dead body, only a pristine beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room…

Beyond that, I will certainly carry on writing crime novels - and poetry, because I'm also a poet. I'm also working on a couple of ideas for TV series. And my third psychological thriller, 'The Point of Rescue', is being filmed very soon - starring Olivia Williams from 'The Ghost Writer' as Charlie Zailer. It will be broadcast on ITV1 next year. Their intention, assuming enough people watch the first one, is to make a series of all the books a la 'Prime Suspect', so if that happens I will possibly be involved in that too.

MLF: What are you looking forward to most at MLF?

SH: Doing an event with Val McDermid, at the beautiful Whitworth Art Gallery. I love Val's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels, and it's a huge honour to be doing an event with her.

You can catch Sophie Hannah and Val McDermid at our Women in Crime Fiction event, Friday 22nd October, 7:30pm at The Whitworh Art Gallery. Tickets are £7/£5 concessions. See you there!

Kirsty Young (Digital Marketing Assistant)

Send Postcards From Manchester, with the help of acclaimed poets Mandy Coe and John Siddique

Saturday 2nd October 2010, 11am 4pm

Oxford Road's award winning Manchester Museum is the venue for today's informal poetry writing event Postcards From Manchester; also part of The Manchester Weekender.

The city is unexpectedly busy as the event coincides with the University of Manchester's open day. The glassed entrance to the museum allows a steady stream of visitors to enter, many of whom stop at the first table, arranged attractively with a selection of Manchester Literature Festival postcards and leaflets. Whilst some move forward to take part, others take a souvenir postcard and hastily shy away.

The museum's brilliant-white, airy atrium is set up with two rectangular tables kept apart to provide pockets of privacy, amidst the busy museum entry point.

Mandy Coe and John Siddique are already engaged in activity.

John, well known for his work with Key Stage 2 classes, is surrounded by six or seven attentive youngsters, captivated by the poet's lively charm; biros eagerly at the ready. He is heard putting one tiny participant at ease with this helpful advice: "Don't be scared to think for a minute; and the idea will easily come to you".

I sit beside Mandy Coe. She speaks of her work as a freelance educationalist, just as a father places his son and daughter directly in front on Mandy. The boy looks disinterested, rocking uncomfortably on his chair.

Mandy starts off by asking, "What is the most interesting thing you have seen today?".

The boy immediately replies that it was the dinosaur. He now sits up. He is of course referring to the fossils of Stan the T-Rex in the Pre-historic exhibition. Mandy begins to construct the poem, using the words of the siblings. She then asks if the dinosaur had spoken to them. They both look at each other and shake their heads immediately; the bones obviously couldn't talk.

However Mandy doesn't give up, and in her engaging manner, pushes the children to imagine that if the dinosaur could talk, what would he have said?

"I want to have you for my dinner!" The boy shouts, confidently edging forward.

Mandy adds this fun new dimension to the poem. Mandy asks if they managed to escape this horrible death.

The boy replies, "Of course we did, we fell through the holes in the dinosaur!".

Crashing back to reality, we now picture the two escaping through the narrow gaps in the skeleton's ribcage. The girl confidently determines the postcard's recipient and begins to fill in the address; the boy follows hurriedly, taking pride in his sloping handwriting.

Mandy, just about to start me off, is disturbed by a be-spectacled lady who pronounces herself as a fan and an avid reader of Mandy's collection, her favourite being The Weight of Cows. The lady defines herself as a terrible writer, and Mandy immediately dispels such talk, enforcing us to believe that we are all poets. Mandy asks the lady to think of a colour she had noticed today. The lady's poem now begins with, "California blue fallen to the floor," alluding to a banner she had seen this morning. She continues her poem, inspired by the impressive golden Buddha sat peacefully behind us.

Mandy draws me into a conversation and encourages memories of my student days in Manchester - fitting, as I observed the new generation of students, maps in hand, overwhelmed by the scale of the City. Mandy decides, "I'm just going to write what you said". She captures my observations of leafleted pavements, the curry mile at 3am and the swarming students arriving today.

I am a little distracted as I hear an austere gentleman moving forward, announcing the arrival of his two creative writing students who are here to work with the poets. They are ushered over to John Siddique, who is just about finishing with another set of lively youngsters. John has certainly proven his versatility.

With the help of Mandy and John, Postcards from Manchester manages to simultaneously allay our fears of the blank page and encourage the expertise of the more skilled writer. We are shown that writing poetry comes from observation, open conversation and most of all, from the simplest experience.

Mandy and John masterfully draw out that inner poet (it seems we all have one!), with their modest, 'anyone-can-write' attitude.

Links for further reading

www.creativetourist.com/news-and-blog/something-for-the-weekend-the-manchester-weekender-1-3-october

www.mandycoe.com

www.johnsiddique.co.uk

www.manchester.museum.ac.uk

Shaheeda Patel

I currently work as a Teacher of English and Drama in Lancashire. I have also worked on literature development projects through Time-To-Read and Lancashire Libraries.

Lionel Shriver dreams of teaming up with Edith Wharton to take on the fêted boys

The festival is getting closer and closer, in fact it officially starts in just 2 weeks, with Lionel Shriver discussing her new novel "So Much for That" on the 14th October. With some pre-festival events this weekend as part of the Manchester Weekender, we can't wait to get stuck in!

To whet your appetites, over the next couple of weeks I'll be uploading some mini-interviews with a selection of this year's special guests. Thanks Lionel for being the first!

MLF: What are you reading at the moment?

LS: I just finished "Caribou Island" by David Vann, and next in the pile is Allegra Goodman's "The Cookbook Collector" – to which I'm especially looking forward to, since I was such a huge fan of her earlier novel "Intuition".

MLF: What made you want to be a writer? Who/ what is your biggest inspiration?

LS: Reading made me want to be a writer, soon after I learned how. So I guess you can most credit Bartholomew and the Oobleck, Where the Wild Things Are, Babar, CS Lewis's Narnia books, All Hallow's Eve, and subsequently a trove of science fiction, with which I became obsessively entranced by the age of ten: Robert Heinlien, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke. I moved on, of course, to Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, but it was those early books that instilled a love of reading and an entrancement with the power of storytelling.

MLF: If you could meet any writer, artist, musician (alive or dead) who would it be and why?

LS: Edith Wharton. I think she and I could kill off a bottle of wine together with great gusto. I could grumble about the hoo-ha around J. Franzen, and she could grumble about the hoo-ha around Henry James.

MLF: What would you be if not a writer?

LS: A figure sculptor.

MLF: Do you ever get writer's block? If you do, how do you get over it?

LS: Not generally, though I am aware of sneakily putting off starting my next book at the moment. I'll get over it because eventually, spongeing the kitchen floor when it's not really that dirty, I'll feel too guilty. Guilt is a great motivator.

MLF: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of?

LS: Of my backlist, "Game Control"– which I still think is my most under-appreciated novel. Otherwise, I guess I'm proudest of my last novel, "So Much for That". Making a book about illness and death fun to read was something of an achievement.

MLF: What do you see in your future?

LS: More books and bad knees.

MLF: What are you looking forward to most at MLF?

LS: I'm tempted to say, "The train home" – since I do a fair number of festival appearances. But less facetiously, though I tire of hewing to PR schedules, finding a place to lock my bike at Paddington, and filling out questionnaires for websites, I always enjoy the events themselves – particularly the Q & A at the end, which is always different, and keeps me on my toes. Writing itself is isolated, and I love hearing from my readership and getting their stories.

Lionel Shriver's latest novel "So Much for That" is published by Harper Collins.

You can catch Lionel at this year's festival on Thursday 14th October, 7pm at the Banqueting Room, Manchester Town Hall. Tickets are £7/£5

Find out more here

Kirsty Young (Digital Marketing Assistant)

New Orleans in Manchester

I have to admit, I don't know much about the Spoken Word Scene or its participants (aside from my favourite angry man Henry Rollins) but there is something I find very appealing about it. The passionate display of slightly moody social commentators protesting on behalf of the person on the street is romantic. Combine that with a bit of Jazz, please.

So, in my mission to learn, I'm extremely excited that this year's MLF presents one of America's premier spoken word poets, Chuck Perkins - dubbed the poet laureate of New Orleans by New York Times music jounalist, Larry Blumfeld.

Chuck has appeared extensively across America and at last year's Banlieues Bleues festival in Paris. He has performed with many jazz greats and in 2004 he created his avante garde circus Voices of the Big Easy, fusing poetry, music and dance.

Chuck will be performing with local jazz musicians, Aid Todd, Andy Boothman, Rich Sliwa and Lawrence Woof. Members of the Young Identity poetry collective will kick the evening off.

This is the event that I'm most looking forward to.

Saturday 23rd October, 7:30pm, Zion Arts Centre

Have a look here for more info

Book here

Watch Chuck perform at The Jazz Gallery, NYC