Incorporating Writing Issue Vol 4

incorporating writing
Issue 3 Vol 4 PLAYWRIGHTS & CRITICS
Wrestling with the writer:

Playwrights get dirty
COMPETITION GIVEAWAY PAGE 4

Sam Shepard - Kenneth Tynan - Clare Pollard
Incorporating Writing
(ISSN 1743-0380)
Contents
Editorial Playwrights and Critics
Page
Editorial Team
Managing Editor Bixby Monk Guest Editor Chaz Brenchley Articles Editor Fiona Ferguson Interviews Editor Andrew Oldham Reviews Editor G.P.Kennedy Columnists Andrew ODonnell, George Wallace, Dave Wood, Sharon Sadle Contributors John Terry, Kevin Berger, Clare Pollard, Kate Parrinder, Clare Reddaway, Bridget Whelan, Cath Nichols, Jess Greenwood Cover Art Lisha Aquino Rooney Design Marsh Thomas Contact Details http://www.incwriters.com incorporatingmag@yahoo.co.uk
G.P. Kennedy looks at being a critic and being appointed as an Editor.
Interviews The Right Stuff
Kevin Berger talks with playwright and actor, Sam Shepard.
13
Articles Wrestling with the writer
John Terry climbs into the mind of the playwright and the raucous theatre.
Early Stages
Clare Pollard looks at the experience of writing for the Royal Court.
33
Kenneth Tynan
The first man to swear on television cut a critical swathe through popular culture.
45
Columns ODonnell on Donaghy

Michael Donaghy.
Andrew ODonnell discusses the work of
11
Cubicle Escapee
Sharon Sadle drifts down the greatest river of all.
25
Artwork Perfect Eye
Incorporating Writing is an imprint of The Incwriters Society (UK). The magazine is managed by an editorial team independent of The Societys Constitution. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without permission of the publishers. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, reproduction of articles, photographs or content. Incorporating Writing has endeavoured to ensure that all information inside the magazine is correct, however prices and details are subject to change. Individual contributors indemnify Incorporating Writing, The Incwriters Society (UK) against copyright claims, monetary claims, tax payments / NI contributions, or any other claims. This magazine is produced in the UK. The Incwriters Society (UK) 2005
Cover artist, Lisha Rooney exhibits some of her work.
29
Reviews Competition News and Opportunities
35 4 49
Playwrights and Critics

Editorial by G.P. Kennedy pages of the magazine as I recently ascended to the position of its Reviews Editor. Yes, I, GP Kennedy, comprehensive school moderate achiever have grafted my way up the greasy pole of literary criticism, the slippery slope of journalism, to achieve such a lofty and highly responsible position a proud day indeed. I make no mistake in thinking that working as a critic is nothing short of important, perhaps more. Think of all those men and women working away solitarily in their garrets, attics, bedrooms, studies, garages, multifarious outbuildings these writers.
A very warm welcome to the latest Incorporating Writing, the Playwrights and Critics edition. This time around we are featuring a coruscating interview with the ever-stellar American playwright, Sam Shepard, the elusive cowboy of the American Theatre. The Shepard piece receives strong and most able support from, among others, Clare Pollard as she waxes on her experiences as a writer turning her attentions to the stage, and columns from Andrew ODonnell and Sharon Nagle. It behoves me to say, in addition, that no edition of the magazine would be sufficiently complete nor wellrounded without the input of a number of keenly critical contributors to the book reviews pages: this month featuring a review of Jim Mangnalls wonderfully imagined poetic-prose tour de force, The Map Maker. I make special mention of the reviews
Yes, books upon books! I do not spend a day when I am not minded to remind myself of the enormous fun to be had
It is a long and lonely business into which one pours a not inconsiderable degree of time, money, research, creativity, stress, frustration, and heart and soul. Should one then be successful in negotiating the Hadean underworld of the literary agents and publishing houses then the title of ones book, with its PR blurb, may well appear in a catalogue, pamphlet or email for my consideration, along with who knows how many others in similar positions to myself. (It behoves me to advise at this point that I have recently completed a novel, Half Lived, and I am looking for a literary agent to take it to publishers! Just so you know where I am coming from and that I am speaking not only from experience as a critic but very direct and ongoing experience as a
writer!). Thence it falls to me to pore over the catalogues, pamphlets and emails and make a series of critical and creative judgements to create for review a number of books often no more than a dozen from a total of hundreds, whose length may vary from sixty pages to six hundred; subject matter from the poetry of the Scottish Isles to an Arabian fantasy/drama/love story epic: and so it goes. In short, the task of a Reviews Editor and, subsequently, the critic is an enormously difficult, fraught, vastly enjoyable and endlessly varied and fascinating one. In what other sphere can one be sure of a regular supply of the possession one prizes most highly? Yes, books upon books! I do not spend a day when I am not minded to remind myself of the enormous fun to be had and the great honour it is for me to hold a position in which I am able to decide which books are reviewed within this magazine. If that sounds a bit dewyeyed, a little too redolent of brownnosery (yes, I made up that word) then so be it. I love books; I get to select books; I get to review books, here and in a host of other magazines; I get to write articles about books; then I get to keep books. La vie est belle. Enjoy Incorporating Writing it is all about books!
G. P. Kennedy is Reviews Editor for Incorporating Writing and a freelance writer of ten years standing. Having slaved successfully in the corporate arena for seven years he turned his writing gifts and skills to the literary world finding time to review and write articles for a number of serious newspapers and lofty lit mags, and complete the MA Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. After living a transatlantic life for a couple of years, mainly between Manchester, England and the independent state of Texas, he has decided upon a relative settling down in Liverpool with the loves of his life.
WIN THE HOW TO BOOK WITH A DIFFERENCE Mat Cowards Success . . . And How To Avoid cobines humour with practical information, and is based firmly on hard-won personal knowledge, its a tonic, an antidote, a survival kit for every writer who is fed up with being told how easy it is to write yourself a fortune. Available at www.ttapress.com Win a copy of this book by sending an email to incorporatingmag@yahoo.co.uk. Deadline 14th October 2006
Incorporating Writing will go quarterly in 2007. Themes for 2007 include NOVELIZATION (January), TRAVEL (April), REGIONAL REVOLUTION (July) and FOOD (October). Guidelines can be found at www.incwriters.com All enquiries and deadline details are available from: Andrew Oldham (Interviews Editor) andrew_incwriters@yahoo.co.uk Fiona Ferguson (Articles Editor) articles_incwriters@yahoo.co.uk G.P. Kennedy (Reviews Editor) reviews_incwriters@yahoo.co.uk
CALL FOR WRITERS
www.incwriters.com
RedInk
1
Name Address Email Telephone I wish to subscribe for 1 Year 4.00 2 Years 7.00 Single Issue 2.00
Signed Print Name Date
RedInk
Subscription Form
Please note that all cheques must be payable to The Incwriters Society. Red Ink is governed by the The Societys constitution, further details can be found on The Societys homepage at www.incwriters.com.All cheques must be returned with subscription form to, Red Ink, c/o 10 Bottoms Fold Cottages, Micklehurst, Mossley, Lancashire OL5 9NH I understand that Red Ink is PDF magazine (electronic format) and that I will receive it via email twice a year (Summer and Winter), and that as such, I must keep Red Ink up to date with any changes in my email, this can be done so by emailing redinkeditors@yahoo.co.uk. Neglecting to keep Red Ink up to date with my contact details and email will result in me not receiving the magazine.
All monies received go towards the running of the magazine and Aim and Objects of The Incwriters Society.
7 Wrestling
with the writer
Article by John Terry To write is generally thought of as a solitary activity; pursued in garden photo taken from Soldiers directed by John Terry
Sheds and garrets, delivering written manuscripts to a distant, faceless readership. But there are exceptions to this, of which the writers of drama for stage and screen are the most divergent. As a theatre director, I have been one of the prime interlopers, crashing into their happy idyll to discuss, argue and challenge their work. But theatre making is a group activity, relying on a baffling entanglement of relationships, of which those involving the playwright can be the most sensitive but also the most productive. Attitudes from the industry towards the playwright vary considerably around the world; some follow Hollywoods example, where contract-bound lackeys consider themselves lucky if their audience even see their name mentioned; others much of mainland Europe treat their writers as unsung heroes. In the UK, although
things are changing, the average approach of most directors and companies is to reveal solely the playwrights intentions through production, and to keep their own theories for the bar after the show. The critics and audiences are left struggling to decide whether it is more absurd to watch a perfectly good comedy of manners restaged on a trampoline, or an obstinately traditional classic that makes no attempt to find relevance to the contemporary world. The difficulty lies in assimilating the apparently solitary activity of writing with the raucous and unstable group atmosphere of the rehearsal room and the production meeting. Like an actor near alcohol or a director at a polite social occasion, the rehearsal room is a dangerous unpredictable habitat for many writers. This is where the filter between
writer and audience is created, and where the decisions that will either restrict or amplify the text are made. The writer is hugely valuable a biased but always fresh and experienced eye to cast over work in progress, and often it is nothing more than a directors insecurity that obstructs this opportunity. Similarly, a writer has to accept that critics and audiences will encounter work presented under his name, but that he is nonetheless fundamentally unable to convey every nuance of his intention to them. Playwriting therefore, one would think, would not be natural pastures for control freaks. Unfortunately, many writers do not always understand that the script is now in joint ownership it has been given birth, and now it needs a broader group of nurturing hands if it is to grow and reach out to an audience.
leaping too early, by acting on courage without the foundation of respect and understanding for the foundations that the playwright has laid out. Conversely, one can take too timid a line, leaving that horrible sense of so what hanging in the air as the curtain falls. The grain of sand and the oyster shell do not alone make the pearl it takes time to work the two together. The strongest theatre comes out of an almost quantum balance. Whose version will win out the playwright, the director, the actor? The lighting designer whose coloured light illuminates the moment? The musician whose melancholy chord underscores it? Or a combination of any or all of the above? All of these meanings and intentions exist in parallel until each member of the audience observes it. And in observing it, and making their own decision, they fix the meaning to its sticking point. This direct line of engagement strung between the writer, the producing company and the audience is what makes the theatre such a potent experience. The writer is part of this multiplicity, and many good playwrights enjoy the process. Like an artistic version of a TV decorating programme, the writer invites someone into their pride and joy, and returns later to discover whether a tasteless disaster has ensued or a stylish transformation beyond their own abilities to achieve. There is constantly pleasant surprise in the distance to which many writers will happily walk from their originally perceived path if one gives them a good reason and a stout walking stick. Communication is the key, participation the challenge.
To write is generally thought of as a solitary activity; pursued in garden sheds and garrets, delivering written manuscripts to a distant, faceless readership
One must first have the respect to fully understand a script, and how it carries and contains the writers intentions, and this process of investigation and discovery should continue throughout preparation and rehearsal. However, one must then take the essential next step; to seek to make the production live for the critics and audiences that will see it, to speak to the peculiarities of their time and place of its context. This takes courage, and not uncommonly, the will to wrestle a little. Many a weak production can be made by
John Terry is a freelance theatre director and commentator based in the UK. His company Shapeshifter can be found at www.shapeshifter.org.uk
The Sea
a poetry tour, with Pat Borthwick

17th May 2006 25th May 2006 28th May 2006 3rd July 2006 6th October 2006 12th October 25th October 2006 31st October 2006 8th November 2006
Milner Place
+ Special Guest Poets & Writers
Ian Parks
Everyman Bistro, Liverpool Manchester Central Library Mossley Music Festival Bradford Literature Festival Beehive Poets Lytham St Annes Library IIkley Literature Festival Bluebell Bookshop, 8 Angel Lane, Penrith Tyne Metropolitan College Electraglade, Sherlocks Coffee House, Flowergate, Whitby 8.30PM 1:00PM 7:00PM 8:00PM 12:30PM 9:00PM 7:30PM 2:00PM 8:00PM
Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks + Andrew Oldham Ian Parks & Milner Place Ian Parks + Special Competition Guests Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks & Milner Place Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks & Milner Place + Peter Lewin Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks & Milner Place Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks & Milner Place + Geraldine Green, Marita Over & Jospehine Dickinson Pat Borthwick and Ian Parks Pat Borthwick, Ian Parks & Milner Place + Chris Firth
For further information visit www.incwriters.com Image courtesy of Dan Lyons http://www.daniel-lyons-photography.com/
11
ODonnell on Donaghy
Column by Andrew ODonnell sections. Im not sure if the poems have been ordered from a draft of a collection but assume the ordering of the manuscript was Donaghys. Donaghys partner, Maddy Paxman, tells us in her opening note, that the title comes from the name of the computer file Michael had kept for his final drafts of poems toward a new collection. The sections in Safest are quite short and the great difficulty here is one of theme. This may be made clearer over time/with further readings etc. Also Im not sure how threaded the poems are intended to be and, most probably, well never know, but the first poem, Upon a Claude Glass, seems to mirror the tone of these last poems as a whole. The poem finds Donaghy musing on the relationship between life and art, as he describes the lot of the amateur artist (all artists being amateurs before the greater reality of the subject of his/her art): intent upon the romance in the box, / keeping unframed nature at their backs, / and some would come to grief upon the rocks. What surprises here, though, is this abrupt shift in tone between the fourth and fifth stanzas. The poem continues to its conclusion: Dont look so smug. Dont think youre any safer / as you blunder through your years / squinting to recall some faded pleasure, / or blinded by some private scrim of tears. / I know. My worlds encircled by this prop, / though all my life Ive tried to force it shut. Yes, its a classic sonneteers turn but theres something very concrete, confrontational and new in the voice here too. Donaghy breaks the rhyme at the end of the poem, suggesting a way out of the form, something not offered by the world of the Claude Glass and how the breaking of the
I came to Donaghys poetry very late, around 2002-ish, when I read some of his poems in the Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry, and various things on the Net. I finally bought Dances Learned Last Night in 2004, at a reading that Donaghy was to have given, along with Matthew Sweeney, at Boltons Octagon Theatre. It was here we were told that Michael had died the previous night. Its only since then that Ive read Donaghys poems with any consistency, and, when you do discover them in this way, you really find out what a rare bag of tricks they are. What strikes me first is the utmost sense of purpose that wills the poems to their ends. Often the material inspiring the poem is mildly esoteric, and often the connections he makes are not crystal clear from a first reading, but beyond that there are always definite shaping mechanisms piecing the poems together. Most importantly there is a persuasiveness of voice, and each poem is intricately plotted without having a definitive plotline, if that makes sense. This is especially applicable to the longer poems. What also makes them work, and has been noted before, is the mix of head and heart in the poems, Donaghy seems to manage juggling both at once, without losing your confidence with either. These are voices with stories, with secretshumans, basically. With Safest we have the last poems Donaghy was working on before his death, arranged into four
12
form depends so much on the form itself. There are a couple of other very potent examples, in Safest, of the observer being unable to flinch in the face of harsh reality (The Whip, Angelus Novus) but Donaghy manages to deal with these themes by cultivating a distanced curiosity. In The Whip a voice tells us of the way reality is constantly escaping our interpretation; here related to the writing of, and the over-writing of poems. Again, theres some abruptness in the metre, Leave it. Dont try to end whats finished with the poem ending up much more of a statement about mortality than merely a metaphorical comparison. A Darkroom finds Donaghy doing what he does best; compelling character narrative: I want to keep Klein in this red dark, / and the rawness in my nose and throat. / I want to stay apprenticed to his trade and I require your assistance. This poem is an incredibly luscious, and such a seemingly obvious metaphor that I cant believe someone hasnt used it before! The poem covers vaguely the same territory as Carvers Afterglow in its concerns, but Donaghys devotion to character narrative helps it achieve very different things. The second section deals with subjects further in the past. From the Safe House is another ambitious long poem, the voice; adopting a deceptive form of reportage by a narrator writing a letter to a dead friend as he was when he was a younger man. This poem works so well on a number of levels; my best advice being: read it. Angelus Novus relates the fight between Homers Hector and Achilles to more modern examples of violence and horror (lynchings in America, Nagasaki) and intensifies the sense of a preoccupation with matters of mortality and suffering, while The Moko is a beautifully written poem on Maori anthropology and is highly descriptive, focusing on correlations between sea and
skin, navigation by signs in the outside world, and inner ones. The third section, for me, is a little patchier, mainly because of the inclusion of the Fragment from Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby.. which seemingly consists of found or pseudo-found material that Donaghy was working on before his death, though it does not pretend to be anything but a rough edit of some interesting ideas. The final part is, for the most part, urban, and where things find their own unique brand of lyricism. The River Glideth of His Own Sweet Will returns to the subject of memory and the strange duality/strange sameness between the watcher and the watched, which is surely a big theme for Donaghy. It concludes But now the nurse pulls shut the blinds / not that youd have clocked one another. / What unaided eyes could possibly connect / thirty years across Westminster bridge / through traffic fumes, crowds, / children, career, marriage, mortgage? Theres a kind of awed amazement in these lines. Among the other highlights here include the final three poems A Sicilian Defense, Exiles End and the wonderful lullaby-like Two Spells for Sleeping with its final and beautiful stockpiling of verbs. Safest, like all of Donaghys work, has a great precision of purpose, perhaps even more unique and surprising here, I guess, since it becomes quite obvious that these are the poems of someone quietly confronting mortality head on. And for Donaghys special, intriguing voice not to waver from its most important concerns during these moments, I feel, is the measure of how worse off poetry will be without him. We are very fortunate, then, to have these poems.
Andrew ODonnell was born in Blackpool in 1977 and spent his youth drinking Kestrel lager on the streets of Bolton. He has written about his travels in India, Nepal, lived in Kobe, Osaka (Japan), Pokhara (Nepal), Vancouver and London.
13
The Right Stuff: Sam Shepard

Interview by Kevin Berger (photo AP/Worldwide)
Sam Shepard is wearing black slacks, a black mock-turtleneck sweater and a glossy black leather jacket. The legendary cowboy of American theatre looks dressed up. Like hes heading down to the chapel on Main Street. In fact, what hes doing is looking nice for the theatre donors milling about this San Francisco party, located in a chic restaurant on an industrial slice of the bay. Outdoors on the patio, under an unusually clear night sky, Shepard stands by a heater that glows like a street lamp and chats with a covey of Armani-clad socialites. Its a stunning sight, really. For not only has Shepard steered clear of the public since gaining renown as the second coming of Gary Cooper in The Right Stuff, he has made the pitfalls of fame a critical theme in many of his four dozen plays. After his Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, he said he, got a greater feeling of accomplishment and pride of
achievement from winning a roping contest in a rodeo.
Up close, Shepard is tall, gaunt as an aging rancher and still as classically handsome as the moment he appeared on-screen
After three decades in the theatre business, though, the 62-year-old playwright (editors note: at time of interview Shepard was 57) knows first hand that private donations are what keep regional stage doors open. He knows a little celebrity glad-handing seems to loosen the purse strings of the well-to-do, especially the new mediadoused generation of the young and the rich here in Yahooland. Besides, he holds a genuine affection for San Franciscos Magic Theatre, which produced his new play, The Late Henry
14
Moss, and where he worked as playwright-in-residence in the late 70s, when he wrote his famous family plays: Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and True West. But even if this party is making him think he would rather be home on his Minnesota horse ranch with his partner Jessica Lange, their teenage daughter, Hannah, and son, Walker, he has plenty of celebrity support As promised, the dream cast of The Late Henry Moss is here, too: Sean Penn is play-wrestling with his kids near a banquet table; Woody Harrelson is chatting up a female journalist as he lifts a beer off a waiters tray; and Nick Nolte, decked out in a knee-length seersucker coat and ratty Panama hat, looking like he just washed out of a Thomas McGuane novel, is holding court with a story about, if my eavesdropping is accurate, the thrills of cross-dressing. As the party swells with San Franciscos requisite band of stars Robin Williams, Don Johnson, Bob Weir it grows positively giddy with that strange celebrity vortex that sucks people toward the famous but stops us short of actually talking to them. As fans, our greatest fantasy about celebrities is that they would really dig us as friends if they could get to know us in casual conversation in some cedar Montana bar. But rather than risk discovering that Sean Penn or Sam Shepard doesnt care one way or the other whether we too love Cormac McCarthy and John Ford, we dont dare breach their personal spaces their auras, really. It would be too humiliating. Its safer to leave them framed in fantasy. And in most cases, rather than deal with the predictable anxieties of their audiences, celebrities prefer to circle in their own orbit. Again and again, Shepard has written
brilliantly about being trapped by the images others have given him, that he has given himself. Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image, lectures the gangster rock star Crow in The Tooth of Crime. The inability to connect with others through the skeins of our illusions is a driving theme of Shepards passionate, violent work. But outside of his plays, anyway he has done little complaining or explaining about his image. Which is one reason why he remains such a magnetic presence in person. Its sentimental, a little hagiographic, probably, to call artists mysterious. But as Shepard drifts through this party, its precisely his elusiveness that makes it so hard to take your eyes off him. My curiosity finally gets the best of me and I walk over to Shepard to ask how hes holding up as the evening star. Besides, I have a special passport to cross the fan-celebrity threshold: A week before, I had interviewed Shepard on the telephone, so I have a painless excuse to introduce myself. Oh, pleased to meet you, he says in his dulcet, country-and-western drawl, remembering, I think, our previous conversation. At the time, he was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, taking a break from playing a small role in a John Travolta spy movie called Swordfish. Up close, Shepard is tall, gaunt as an aging rancher and still as classically handsome as the moment he appeared on-screen as the laconic, fatally ill wheat farmer in Days of Heaven. His hair is thinner now, more of his forehead is revealed, and his sharp nose and high, Native American-like cheekbones, along with the lines in his weatherworn face,
15
Shepard seems, though, his conversational manner is clearly schooled by his spiritual mentor, Samuel Beckett
16
deepen the wisdom of his sad blue eyes. As friendly and accommodating as Shepard seems, though, his conversational manner is clearly schooled by his spiritual mentor, Samuel Beckett. Yes, he agrees, the celebrity thing does feel a little off the charts tonight. But he doesnt mind it for a while. I think Armani put up a lot of money for the party, he says. Dont blame him, though, for jump-starting the celebrity machine to gain attention for his new play. I didnt set out to cast movie stars, he says. It just happens that every single one of them is a dynamite actor. The fact that theyre movie stars is something else. The Late Henry Moss hasnt opened yet. So I tell Shepard from what Ive read about its plot two rival brothers trying to piece together the details of their alcoholic fathers death in the New Mexico desert that it sounds like a dramatization of one of the stories from his collection, Cruising Paradise. In that story, set in New Mexico, the authors father staggers out of a bar into the middle of a road and is killed by a car. Later, the author finds, among his late fathers belongings, a pile of unmailed letters, one of which is addressed to him. It concludes: See you in my dreams. Did that really happen? I ask. It did, yeah, Shepard responds. The 1989 story was indeed a blueprint for The Late Henry Moss, which was inspired by his fathers death in 1984. It took me five years to even consider writing about it, he says. Finally, I came to the point where I thought that if I dont write about it, some aspect of it may be lost. Since the stories in Cruising Paradise arent labeled as autobiographical, but read as if theyre lifted out his journal, I cant help asking Shepard about the hilarious Spencer Tracy Is Not Dead. The
most underrated quality of Shepards writing is that it is really, truly funny. So was he really driven to a movie shoot in Mexico in a metallic blue limo by a German named Gunther, who was wearing a tuxedo, cummerbund and fluffy shirt? Did they really get pulled over for speeding in El Paso and have the car stripped by the drug police? Shepard smiles, crows feet spreading across his temples. Yeah. They let the air out of all the tyres so we couldnt go anywhere. Poped the hubcaps. Went through all of our luggage. Yeah, thats true. The shoot was for the movie Voyager, based on the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch. Have you read it? asks Shepard. I think Frisch is one of the best modern writers. In fact, I have. But before I say anything, I see Shepard is looking across the patio. Well, I gotta go meet Sean, he says. Nice talkin to you. As the party wears on, Shepard remains insulated by friends, eating dinner with Philip Kaufman, who directed him in The Right Stuff and talking with musician TBone Burnett, whom Shepard has known since 1976, when they were both members of Bob Dylans Rolling Thunder Revue. Hes the only one on the tour Im not sure has relative control over his violent dark side, Shepard would write about Burnett. Hes not scary, hes just crazy. Toward the end of the night, Shepard and the lanky Burnett join the dinner jazz band, the Randy Scott Trio. A drummer since he was a wayward California teenager, Shepard gets behind the kit; Burnett commandeers a microphone and they knock out a version of the novelty country hit Long Tall Texan. As the remaining partygoers head out the door for home, Shepard bangs his way through Chuck Berrys rickety classic Too Much
17
Monkey Business. I was never one to live in the past is the first and last line of The Late Henry Moss. In between, Shepard has crafted his most moving, certainly most tender attempt to resolve a sons agony over his abusive, alcoholic fathers death. The play actually caroms between two brothers who, contrary to their opening and closing line, live trapped in the past. One is pinched, nasty and repressed (Penn), the other sodden, pitiful and ultimately loving (Nolte). Their drive to piece together the arc and fall of their fathers final bender is a desperate desire to spring themselves from the traumatic memories of him viciously beating their mother memories they blame for shaping the estranged courses of their own wanton lives. The Late Henry Moss is fueled by Shepards curt, charged dialogue and a boisterous, comic-relief performance by Harrelson as a bewildered taxi driver with clues to the patriarch Henry Moss final days on a fishing trip. As Moss himself, who appears through flashbacks, veteran stage and movie actor James Gammon literally is the damaged alcoholic looking into the spiritual emptiness of his guttersnipe life. I thought Id killed her, he finally confesses of beating his wife. But it was me I killed! In many ways, The Late Henry Moss reprises themes, characters and stage devices that have long defined Shepards writing. But despite the critics who pounced on the parallels to bolster their dim opinions that Shepard was treading old ground, the play represents a beautiful, elegiac summary of the themes that have tortured Shepard to create one of the most prolific and original careers in the American theater.
The Late Henry Moss is not Shepards best play. Penn either misinterpreted the role of Ray Moss, badly underplaying his simmering resentment, or Shepard needs to sharpen Rays portrait as a control freak on the edge. The character never catches fire and so when he does erupt in anger the effect is a dud.
People on the move who couldnt move anymore, who wound up in trailer parks
But no matter. Noltes and Gammons final showdown is spectacular. It begins as a squonking duet of guilt and regret and takes flight on a simple melody of forgiveness. The smoky, gravelly timbre of Gammons and Noltes voices is so eerily similar that during their emotional sparring they seem to change sides, to transpose into one another. The son becomes the father and in the process discovers his own heart. After the anger and recrimination between them ebbs, Gammon collapses in bed. With what seems like his own last breath, an exhausted Nolte asks his father if he wants something, a blanket, maybe? Its heartbreaking. Earlier, Gammon had posed, Peaceful, that would be something, wouldnt it? But a sons peacefulness is what we take away from the theater, a gift from Shepard that has been a very long time in coming. The New Yorkers John Lahr, who has written about Shepard for more than two decades, was alone among critics in pointing out that Shepards fictionalized father made his first appearance in 1969 in The Holy Ghostly when he was called Stanley Moss. Lahr doesnt state as much, but The Holy Ghostly and The Late Henry
18
Moss serve as perfect bookends of Shepards plays. In between lies the evolution of the playwrights art, a search through pain and illusion, memory and history, for transcendence and peace. The Holy Ghostlys plot can be summarized as: Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you. With its loopy songs and syncopated language, mad witches and mean motherfucker sons, its wonderfully representative of Shepards early plays, the huge batch of one-acts that seemed to pour out of him before he settled into the more complex and reflective Buried Child in 1978. Living in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side and bussing tables at the Village Gate, Shepard at 26 years old was living and writing close to the bone. He didnt care if his work was perceived as autobiography. From the mouth of the horn-mad son to the father, who cries out that hes dead inside, these were the words that the young writer just had to say in The Holy Ghostly: For eighteen years I was your slave. I worked for you hand and foot. Shearing the sheep. Irrigating the trees, listening to your bullshit about improve your mind, youll never get ahead, learn how to lose, hard work and guts and never say die and now I suppose you want me to bring you back to life. You pathetic creep. Hire yourself a professional mourner, Jim. Im splitting. Before he does, though, he pulls out a gun and shoots his father in the stomach. Shepard these days advises fans not to get too excited about his early plays. Says he in Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself, a fine video documentary that made the PBS rounds in 1998: They were chants, they were incantations, they were spells, or whatever you want to call them. You
get on em and you go. To say they were well-thought out, they werent. They were a pulse. And the erratic heartbeat in most of them was pumped by Shepard looking back in anger at his 1950s childhood on a small avocado ranch in Duarte, Calif., a town outside of Pasadena that was no more than a suburban remnant, thrown up with leftover building materials that developers had little use for. Duarte was a weird accumulation of things, a strange kind of melting pot Spanish, Okie, black, Midwestern elements all jumbled together. People on the move who couldnt move anymore, who wound up in trailer parks, Shepard told Rolling Stones Jonathon Cott in 1986. Shepards parents had always been on the move. His father was raised on an Illinois farm and later joined the Army Air Corps. Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1943. Following the birth of his two younger sisters, the family moved to South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Guam and South Pasadena before settling in Duarte. Shepards mother was a teacher and his father held a series of odd jobs while he attended night school to also be a teacher. My father had a real short fuse, Shepard told biographer Don Shewey. He had a really tough life had to support his mother and brothers at a very young age when his dads farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. It was past frustration; it was anger. More often than not, Shepard was the brunt of that anger. So when he read about a small traveling theater coming through Duarte, Shepard, who had become smitten with acting in high
19
Sam Taylor Wood
school, and had scratched out poems about despair in his dead-end town, signed on for the ride. Performing Thornton Wilder plays in New England churches? Sure, why not? When the Bishops Company Repertory Players landed in New York, Shepard got off the bus. Perhaps the one thing to know about Shepards maturation as a writer is how diligently and obsessively he worked. Its something that seems to get obscured in all the romantic stories about his affair with blooming rock poet Patti Smith and their collaboration on the play Cowboy Mouth, his stint as a drummer in the acid-dipped folk band the Holy Modal
Rounders, in, really, all the ink spilled over Shepards Hollywood image as an intellectual loner, as Voyager director Volker Schlondorff described him. In New York in the 60s, Shepard lived with the son of the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus Jr., who had also grown up in Duarte. He never stopped writing, Mingus said of the times when Shepard wasnt reading Beckett, Pirandello, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. Shepard would walk into a room and close the door, with the clacking of the typewriter and all. Then he would come out with a play in a box that the paper came in, a ream of paper.
Continues Page 21...
Advertising here is cheaper than you think
incorporatingmag@yahoo.co.uk
For further information email:
www.incwriters.com
21
...From Page 19.
Dennis Ludlow, who helped build horse fences and a barn on Shepards small Northern Californian ranch during the 70s (and who played supporting roles in Magic Theatre productions of Buried Child and Fool for Love), tells me his most indelible memory of Shepard is of the restless playwright writing in a pocket-size notebook. He was always writing down what he heard in bars, stores, everywhere, says Ludlow. Later, one of Shepards playwriting classes presented him with a carton of the tiny writing pads. Still, Shepards early plays were scintillating rock riffs without accessible verses and choruses until he met New York director and acting teacher Joseph Chaikin. He had a tremendous influence on Shepard, writes Shewey. The values he espoused his steadfast faith in the priority of art over glamour, show business, wealth, and fame left a lasting impression. Shepard told the Paris Review that Chaikin helped him understand theres no room for selfindulgence in theater; you have to be thinking about the audience. Under Chaikins counsel, Shepard began doing something he had never dreamed of before: rewriting. Joe was so persistent about finding the essence of something, says Shepard. Hed say, Does this mean what were trying to make it mean? Can it be constructed some other way? That fascinated me, because my tendency was to jam, like it was jazz or something. Thelonious Monk style. Chaikins influence blossomed in Shepard at about the same time the playwright was tiring of his ragged band of pop culture outlaws: drugstore cowboys and
gunslinger rock stars, bluesy swamp rats and speed-freak gamblers. In the mid70s, after living for a year in London, Shepard settled in countrified Marin County, Calif., with his wife O-Lan, an actress, and young son Jesse. They shared a house with O-Lans mother, Scarlett, and Scarletts husband, photographer and writer Johnny Dark. With Magic Theatre actors and directors, writers and musicians coming and going, Shepard felt at home in this very strong community of artists, he tells me. It was energetic and intense in a way that I had missed from New York. I dont think Ive really come across that situation again. There was something really great about the Magic experience.
Shepards early plays were scintillating rock riffs without accessible verses and choruses
At home on fertile new artistic ground, and committed to a new seriousness in his writing, Shepard stopped heeding every impetuous urge and began listening to voices arising from a deep and wide rift in his heart the emotional space surrounding his family, particularly around my old man, he says. I was a little afraid of it, a lot of that emotional territory. I didnt really want to tiptoe in there. And then I thought, well, maybe I better. Of course, Shepard didnt exactly tiptoe in there. As everyone knows who has seen his trilogy of family plays Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and True West, which he wrote in a creative burst of three years Shepard ripped the door off the hinges, smashed the toasters and exposed an incredible torment at the core of postwar American families. Sons and
22 Remarkably, Shepard forged his own concentrated, explosive language.
fathers, mothers and daughters, aunts and uncles all were splintered by a never-ending race for never enough money, by base sex and ambition, by inevitably mounting layers of frustration. At least thats how it felt as we sat, awestruck, in the theater. Most remarkably, Shepard forged his own concentrated, explosive language. The fury was still there, but now the words were stripped of pretension. Shepard created a colloquial poetry of exposure, rhythms rising in an endless crescendo. about it! In 1983, Shepard could admire the critical and popular success of his family plays. John Malkovich and Gary Sinise had mounted a daring production of True West that he truly loved. His romantic
affair with Lange was deepening, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in The Right Stuff. At the same time, from the set of Country which he was filming with Lange in Iowa, he wrote Chaikin a letter: Somethings been coming to me lately about this whole question of being lost. It only makes sense to me in relation to an idea of ones identity being shattered under severe personal circumstances in a state of crisis where everything that Ive previously identified with in myself suddenly falls away. When he lived in London, Shepard became enamored with the writings of Russian spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff. So his sharp sense of being lost, of having his identity shattered, no doubt
23
represented to him a kind of pure state of inner being. It is an empty place, a chaotic and frightening one, but it is a place free of illusion, a place where everything a public artist, a celebrity, has been told he is doesnt hold. The one predominant and enduring theme in Shepards work is the agonizing struggle to fill that empty space with love. Listen to him in his story, You I Have No Distance From: I cant remember what it was like before I met you. Was I always like this? I remember myself lost ... But you I have no distance from. Every move you make feels like Im traveling in your skin. The evolution of Shepards personal life is shown in technicolor in the tract homes and desert huts of his plays. In the absence of love and connection, the booze flows; relationships come crashing down. The explosive Fool for Love, in which lovers and half-siblings May and Eddie rage at each other in jealousy You know were connected May. Well always be connected can easily be seen as the end of Shepards marriage. Indeed, that year (1983), he permanently left O-Lan to move in with Lange. His divorce was final in 1984. Given the tempestuous turns his characters have taken under endless emotional storms, its no wonder he has remained a relatively private man. The search for love and transcendence is a fragile business in the public world of movies and popular theater. Someone always wants to tell you where to go. The allure of Shepards elusive nature is that he has never stopped searching alone. And we can only admire his devotion. He tells me he acts in movies only to support his writing. No way, I say. Youre Sam Shepard. Says he: You cant make a living as a playwright. You can barely
scrape by. He does at times enjoy sinking into a role, but, just the same, he would rather be on his ranch sinking fence posts, playing with his kids or writing in his small room next to the barn. Like his characters in The Late Henry Moss, Shepard is not one to live in the past. He has not resolved the anguish that fathers and sons heap upon themselves, but he has peeled away a great deal of the despair, exposing an ember of hope. Clearly, Shepard has traveled a long way from blasting his fictional father with a revolver to comforting him quietly with a blanket. But at 62, the angular, elusive cowboy is not going soft on us. He is still riding alone across a mesa, its just that now he believes that out there, somewhere, is a deep, enduring peace. In his great 1985 play A Lie of the Mind, he seemed to doubt he would ever find it. But now, it appears, the winds of change have worked their wonders. You know, those winds that wipe everything clean and leave the sky without a cloud. Pure blue. Pure, pure blue.
Kevin Berger is Salons features editor. http:// www.salon.com/
24
25
Cubicle Escapee
Column by Sharon Sadle throwing up my hands and fleeing by plane, we started tackling the list. All this doesnt really matter anymore (means to an end, that was my mantra in Chicago) because on June 15th, off a little unassuming strip of concrete, we launched the boat, loaded to the gills, at the very top of the channel of the Mississippi river in Minneapolis. Within a few hundred feet, on spotting a rippled disturbance in the water beneath the first bridge, I nearly choked with fear. I shut my eyes and waited for disaster, but the boat hardly reacted. We were on our way! As planned, I left Denver at the end of May, expecting to start a trip down the Mississippi river a few days later. What transpired over the next almost three weeks continues to disgruntle me, though Im intent on embracing the moment and forgetting the painfully tedious process that I waded through to get here. Im so nave. Showed up in Chicago with my boat shoes and sleeping bag to eventually discover the false pretenses by which I was lured. There was no arranged place for me to sleep in Chicago so I was snuck into a basement until we figured it out. Tom had just graduated from High School and by just I mean mere weeks previous. I was led to believe he was in college and though I hesitated making a trip with someone so young, I at least thought my trip mates were legal. They are now, but barely. Next was the boat. Not only was it completely unprepared for the voyage, it hadnt even been put in the water. I was stunned. A hundred things needed to be thought of, organized into lists and carried out day by day (by day by day). Instead of bailing out, instead of
All of them are absolutely wild and ours to share with fireflies and unseen animals alone
One mile on the river felt like victory given the difficulty of getting the trip started. Anything that could have happened, short of disaster, did so in the first two days. We overtook and crossed paths with barges (the largest things Ive ever seen in motion), ran aground and dug ourselves out, entered and exited locks, beached the boat, camped on an island, hit a wing dam, damaging the propeller and navigated by day marker. Each day after has brought some combination of most of those things, but they are approached with more comfort and experience. Somehow all these days have passed and are according to presumption: people are friendly, the river isnt a constant mad dash to save ones life and the locks are survivable, as is running out of gas. The scenery is spectacular. The banks along
26
the river are beautifully wild. Big blue sky, puffy clouds stacked high overhead, wide calm water. The river moves us in lots of different ways. Puffs of wind approach in tight ripples, sometimes the surface rolls gently from side to side, other times we bump along in a confused chop. Small whirling areas of unknown origin gurgle up in circles. A few days ago it rained buckets but because there was no lightning we pushed along through the drops that looked like sheets of marbles on the river. Some of the islands we camp on have mulberries and blackberries. Some are skinny and sandy, others are hilly and forested. All of them are absolutely wild and ours to share with fireflies and unseen animals alone. Small pockets of industry, hulking buildings with barge docks and conveyor belts pop up along the banks, dumping who knows what into the river in great spurts, but pass quickly and the scenery looks untouched once again. Every so often, clusters of houses make up Scorchedville, Neglectington, and Brokedown heights, sad, quiet little towns that survive economically on the fame of dead authors who used to live there. Hot sidewalks stretch a block or two in front of antique stores with odd, short hours, butted against boarded up storefronts and I wonder if these towns ever enjoyed full occupancy. Flags lie limp against their poles and theres hardly a breeze off the water. When we stop for gas, people see our supply barrels, row of gas cans and water jugs and know were travelling. They stroll up in small groups, move in tentatively and ask, Where ya headed? There are lots of friendly folk along the river, one who offered a ride in his speedboat. One jerking motion whiplashed me from still to smacking up
and down on the water and I smiled bigger than I had in days. I could make New Orleans by dinner time (shrimp po boy, please) in a boat like that. Some grandpa guided us to his local camp island with a rumored outhouse, which I never found. Got a history of hominy at the Mark Twain Dinette in Hannibal (best all-u-can-stomach fried catfish buffet). An old, crusty guy in some one-dock town drove me to gas (no marinasoops!) and laughed himself into a coughing fit when I told him our final destination. Lots of leatherbacks on lots of docks espousing knowledge and warnings and looking on longingly.
Its a hell of a trip, all and all more grueling than expected. I never imagined Id be so beside-myself pissed-off about someone elses mess
Adjustment to communal living aboard the boat has been a long, slow process. Day 18 and over these 670 miles, were the trashiest boat on the entire Mississippi river. I brood over unwashed pots and sloppy wads of wet boxer shorts and socks, which lay around for days. Fishing poles tangle themselves together with oars and random sticks and trash that the guys drag aboard. On-deck organization is not to my liking but my desire for order goes mostly ignored. I resisted and rebelled against a good time, tormented and miserable for having no personal space to lord over, but am finally getting more comfortable with the routine, with the meals (prunes and crackers, noodles and corn, biscuits and spam) and my role in the launch-land continued page 28...
27
28
...from page 26 sequence (engine lifter). Each time Ive considered leaving, decided I could no longer tolerate the mess on board or the stress of approaching a dam, some cool breeze will revive me, someone will pass around a chocolate bar, or Ill realize were further along than I thought and my unhappiness subsides enough to push on. Were in St. Louis which is more than a third of the way done and Ive started thinking for the first time about maybe seeing it through; the glory of rolling through New Orleans, having finished the trip and not given up the dream to small daily discomforts and irritations. Its a hell of a trip, all and all more grueling than expected. I never imagined Id be so beside-myself pissed-off about someone elses mess; never thought my skin could turn so brown and I didnt know one could live well on potted meat and canned vegetables. I crave conversation with peers; my mind fills the time with choruses from songs I never liked. Quite the exercise in fortitude. Weve heard lots and lots about the river below St. Louis, where the Ohio joins in and increases the Mississippis flow. The current is said to pick up significant speed, barges will be twice as large, there are very few marinas and we wont want to touch the water its so polluted. All this talk has me prepared for more of the great unknown and Im poised with anticipation, braced to face the lower Mississippi and the last half or so of the trip.
Sharon Sadle escaped her cubicle on september 22, 2005. shes been traveling away from her hometown in florida by car, north and west, ever since. from the road, sharon writes about coffee with strikers, darts with bartenders, forays into abandoned factories and contemplative discomposure along the byways of the united states. her stash of socks totals 44 pairs.
19 Abercromby Square Liverpool, L69 7ZG readers@liv.ac.uk www.thereader.co.uk Website includes news, events, shop, blog, podcasts. First published in 1997, The Reader has always been a platform for passionate responses to literature. If you love reading, youll be delighted to find The Reader, the literary magazine written with you in mind. The Reader organisation also delivers a variety of innovative literary events and community projects in the North West. Subscription: (1 year/4 issues)24
29
Lisha Aquino Rooney
30
Lisha Aquino Rooney
31
Lisha Aquino Rooney
32
Lisha Aquino Rooney is an American artist living in London. She received her MA Fine Art degree from Central Saint Martins in 2006 and was recently bestowed the Photo of the Week award by The Saatchi Gallery. Her art is inspired by the fragility of moments. For commissions and comments emaill the artist at lisha_rooney@yahoo.com
Lisha Aquino Rooney
33
Article by Clare Pollard the Royal Courts Young Writers Programme, applied, and three years later got a letter inviting me to take part in a group led by Simon Stephens. It was life-changing. An intense crash course, during which we did exercises, read each-others favourite plays, and had fierce debates about stage directions and Sarah Kane over wine in the bar. I soon learnt that, in the theatrical world, the beautiful language that poets obsessed over was treated as little more than a frill what mattered was the Story, and every line had to be moving it forward. It took me quite a while to shake my love for digressions, and I dont think Ill ever quite win my battle with description (the mantra, in contemporary theatre, is: Show not Tell), but I began to recognise that my poetic skills would mean little if I didnt master narrative structure and character arcs.
Early Stages
When I was small, my mum wrote comedies for the WI, and I remember watching dress rehearsals in the village hall and thinking how amazing it was to have so many people laugh at your jokes. Aged four, I wrote my first play, a musical called The Little Goose-Girl - but I soon realised that plays arent so much fun if they dont get acted, and gravitated to writing poems instead. In my first year at university, when my collection The Heavy-Petting Zoo came out, I fell in love with theatre again soon I was voraciously reading Ibsen, Shakespeare, Webster, Buchner, Beckett, the Greeks. But it still seemed slightly silly, somehow, sitting in my room writing a play that needed direction, acting, lighting and costumes to bring it to life a blueprint for a piece of art unlikely to happen, rather than a perfect thing in itself, like a poem. Then I came across a leaflet advertising
I dont think Ill ever quite win my battle with description (the mantra, in contemporary theatre, is: Show not Tell)
Two years later, my father was dying, and I was attempting to get perspective on this by obsessing over global inequality and environmental apocalypse, and telling myself everyone was pretty much doomed anyway. Simon Stephens invited me onto a second course at the Court, and then for two feverish weeks - after visiting the hospital, and talking over the days test results with my mum until she tired herself out and went to bed - I
34
would pour myself a large gin and stay up until the sky got light, pounding out my new play. It turned into The Weather, a nightmare set in the near future, with terrorists blowing up malls and the climate in meltdown. My play centres on a middle class family - a shopoholic, a fat cat and their daughter and the damage they cause. As a poet, I was aware of being too wordy, and wanted to make sure it was visual as well, so introduced a poltergeist an image of the violence of the outer world finally crashing into this smug suburban house. To my astonishment the Royal Court decided to put it on.
write FUCKFACE in gigantic capital letters across the set, and think: I did that. Im now writing a new commission for the Royal Court, The Zoo-Keepers Wife a play about what makes us human, where the animals start speaking. Its taking a lot longer than The Weather, because I feel very much that Im still a learner at this craft, and am trying to think hard about audience, structure, showing instead of telling. But its exciting, to think that soon these characters Ive invented will come alive before my eyes. And what can go wrong with talking monkeys?
And to see a poltergeist write FUCKFACE in gigantic capital letters across the set, and think: I did that
Rehearsals were incredibly stressful. In poetry you have complete control over every nuance of your work, and I found it was hard to let go. My dream of having the poltergeist done with strings was rejected, and an actress hired to play it in Japanese Kabuki style instead. I came back from my honeymoon to find that the window that showed the weather on stage had been scrapped (kind of my central metaphor, so I wasnt that impressed.) The director and cast fell out. By the opening night I was a weeping wreck. Was it alright on the night? Well, it depends which night you went on. I attended eight performances, and a couple made my toes curl. One, the last that I saw, was perfect. Thats the risk, I suppose, and the thrill of live theatre. I did get to see an audience laugh at my jokes though. And to see a poltergeist
Clare Pollard is a poet and playwright. Her latest poetry collection is Look, Clare! Look! (Bloodaxe, 2005). Her play The Weather (Faber) was performed at the Royal Court in 2004,and she is currently writing a new commission for them.
35
As I sit at my desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my existence, by objects endowed with meanings that only I will understand, I feel as if I am sitting in the perfect place to be writing a review about this book. It is only a shame that my desk does not face a window out of which I can gaze and reflect, as Jim Mangnalls narrator does throughout this monologue. Mangnalls poetic-prose tour de force starts out with a collection of sentiments that resonated neatly with me: John Donne was wrong. Every man is an island and each one stands at the centre of his own confusing universe. Just as a British map based on Mercators projection shows the British Isles as the centre of the world and an American map of the same type displays the American continent at the centre, so my own personal map has me, hazily yet unmistakeably pencilled in at the hub of experience. It might be well-trodden ground in some respects, but The Map Maker manages to successfully reflect on the way in which every person perceives the world through a different set of eyes, without resorting to clich. Rather than being a mere philosophical diversion, Mangnalls distinctive voice, being so intensely personal and unique, means that his narrative embodies this concept as well as investigating it. Mangnalls narrator (the phenomenological map maker) is concerned with the uniqueness of perception and experience. His prose puts across what he sees from his impression of time moving forwards, backwards and sometimes sideways, to the particular patterns a patch of frost makes on his windowpane. The streamof-consciousness presentation, whilst
Recommended Read The Map Maker Jim Mangnall

(2001, ISBN 0-900055-07-3, 10.00, 144 pages, Driftwood, and Ambit Books) appearing to lack any kind of order, in fact seems contrived to subvert any expectation of plot, structure or direction, instead evoking a lively, unusual dreamscape, a voyage into one persons head. Starting with himself at the epicentre, the map maker seeks to radiate points of reference from his own desk, his own window, and the square he lives in, but becomes entangled in the sensorial temptations of the present, past and future.
The Map Maker manages to successfully reflect on the way in which every person perceives the world through a different set of eyes, without resorting to clich
The present time is idealised in Mangnalls narrative, as he seeks to revel in the immediacy of his environment his cigarettes, his booze, his records and collected bric-a-brac. Nevertheless, he cannot help but lose himself in solitary recollections of past friends, lovers, parties, greatness, intermingling with a nostalgic tendency to imagine possible futures, pasts, presents: the imagination is here used as a tool to live and experience any possibility, perceived and
36
therefore made real through fantasy. Mangnalls narrator addresses the realist, a man who knows that a window pane exists because he can put his head through it, in a decisive assertion that imagination equals existence: I would like to take him to my window, first seeing that it was suitably reinforced, and show him the cat playing with the sapphire tailors dummy and the expensive, marble aquarium with its apron of blue moonlight. Let him make what he likes of the green creature that looks like a burning flag; I have given up wondering. The instability of the various temporal realities explored in the narrative mean that the map is constantly changing intangible, and ultimately completely ephemeral. However, the exploration of the narrators conscientiousness, becoming progressively more delirious (at one point, we find the narrator in a hospital ward), does not conclude as a failed attempt at map-making, but rather as an invitation to look through his window with him, to experience an enormously rich universe of boundless possibility: Sometimes it looks like a box within a box and sometimes it has an irregular shape like those haphazard rings left by glasses on a bar top. It flows like a silvered Mississippi taking a census in forgotten townships, heavy with the scent of corroding iron flowers and the sad songs of butterflies at lost landings. You could drift forever on a Huckleberry raft circumnavigating a colossal molecule or study the pinhead stars burning under a microscope. And theres mist when it rains on the company store and lightening from the delta and a door to shut and a bell to ring and the double darkness of a box within a box.
In doing this, we are also invited to acknowledge that every individual makes their own map, with themselves at the centre, which we too could glimpse if only they would be so generous as to share it. KATE PARRINDER
See No Evil Michael Ridpath

(392pp ISBN-13: 978-0-71814677-1, ISBN-10: 0-718-14677-8, Price 12.99, Published by Michael Joseph, imprint of Penguin)
SEE NO EVIL is best-selling author Michael Ridpaths second novel to feature
37
his hero Alex Calder, an ex-city trader and ex-RAF pilot. At the beginning of the story, Calder is living quietly in Norfolk, running an airfield. His tranquillity is soon interrupted by the arrival of old university friend Kim and her husband Todd, the son of South African newspaper tycoon Cornelius Van Zyl. Todd is asking questions about the murder of his American mother Martha in South Africa in 1988. At the time, it was assumed that she had been killed by guerrillas, but Todd is not so sure and Kim has convinced him that Calder will be able to help them unravel the mystery.
knows his way around the City and it shows. The problem with finance is that for most of us mortals it can be less than interesting and the pace certainly slows when we go into the boardroom. Ridpath does manage to tie in the deal-making with a conspiracy theory involving a mason style cabal of leading Afrikaners an easy target as we all know that the Boers are fictional shorthand for Nazis which ratchets up the deal beyond the merely corporate. South Africa is certainly a dynamic and topical location for the plot and it does give Ridpath the opportunity to explore the state of the nation in the late 1980s, as the apparatus of apartheid teetered on the brink of destruction but remained as vicious as a cornered dog. He chooses to do this by giving the victim Martha a voice by cutting between the contemporary action and extracts of her diary written in the months leading up to her death. This should have been an effective technique as it should have given life and vibrancy to the dead woman. He has built a promising story for her in the diary, as her marriage begins to fragment and she becomes politicised. However, it does not ring true as a journal. Writing in the first person as a woman is hard enough, without having to produce the immediacy of a diary. The wealth of description and explanation of the political situation that is in the diary springs more from a desire to inform todays reader than a desire to flesh out the victims character. This stylistic trait is not restricted to the diary and the character of Martha. This is a book where the characters are sacrificed to the story. Calder weathers the storms arising from a series of attempts on his life and the implosion of his emotional life with the stiff upper lip he seems to have inherited
The wealth of description and explanation of the political situation that is in the diary springs more from a desire to inform todays reader than a desire to flesh out the victims character
Calder is reluctant, but when Todd is left in a coma after the plane in which Calder had been piloting him mysteriously explodes, he is forced to become involved. As the story progresses, the family secrets of a media tycoon in apartheid South Africa are juxtaposed with a contemporary multi million dollar newspaper deal. After a fair smattering of thrills and spills the novel has a traditional nail biting conclusion involving international conspiracies, aeroplanes, the veldt and, yes, of course, lots of blood and guns. SEE NO EVIL is a readable page-turner, with enough plot to keep you guessing and a few surprising twists. There is a wealth of accurate detail here, particularly when the novel dips into the world of international banking. Ridpath
39
from John Buchan. Cornelius Van Zyl is predictably shrewd and tough, his son Edwin shifty and weak, the Afrikaners characters solid, violent and unthinking.
Ridpath must know his market. After all, bankers are often in airports with time on their hands, and presumably some like to see themselves as the action heroes of thrillers rather than number crunchers
There is no occasion on which a character acts in way that surprises the reader. It might be said that insight and depth are not what is expected in this kind of crime thriller. However, when you read this book the psychological explorations of crime in the books of PD James, Minette Walters or Patricia Highsmith, amongst many others, might never have been written. Ridpath must know his market. After all, bankers are often in airports with time on their hands, and presumably some like to see themselves as the action heroes of thrillers rather than number crunchers. Indeed, the plot is compelling and the book does succeed in making the reader want to know what happens next. But given the wealth of innovative enthralling thrillers there are in the bookshops and libraries at the moment, I wouldnt rush out to buy this one. CLARE REDDAWAY
Back of Beyond - New and Selected Poems Geoff Hattersley

(Smith/Doorstop Books ISBN 1902382773, 8.95GBP)
To be honest I had never heard of Geoff Hattersley until Back of Beyond landed on the mat a couple of weeks ago. Through a good deal of e-search, and econversation with Geoff I can now quote the man in his own words, from a conversation he had with fellow poet and performer, James Nash: I was born and brought up in Wombwell, South Yorkshire. Nearly everybody who lived there used to
40
work down the pit. Now they dont. Im nearly fifty now and feel pretty well settled in Huddersfield. Im married. My wife, Jeanette, is also a published poet. When I was four or five, I apparently used to like to sit under the table and write down everything the adults in the room were saying. Back of Beyond uses about a quarter of the poems in eleven previous titles I published between 1986 and 2002. There are also about twenty new poems. Im currently employed as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University.
This is a book that demands to be bought, whether you love or hate poetry, in fact particularly if you hate poetry. This anthology should be compulsory reading, from the back of beyond to the wild blue yonder.
I hope that creates a collage of the man. Geoff Hattersley is the Arctic Monkeys of poetry I kid ye not. I am talking pure, real, gritty, gutsy street lyricism that mixes the honesty of vernacular with the romanticism of high art. The result is a spellbinding anthology that by turns makes you laugh aloud in the most inappropriate of places, (in my case the echoing main room of Manchester Central Library on a sparsely populated Tuesday morning); choke down tears; swallow hard on emotional indigestion; clap your hands together in affirmation; pity Geoff Hattersley; pity yourself; rejoice; give thanks. Above all you will feel that you
have made a new friend in Geoff, you will feel you know him and his, you will see his house, his local, his locale. You know this guy, he is familiar, he may well be you, or a friend of yours, but either way he is familiar. Hattersley employs the staccato rhythms and patterns of northern vernacular to pace his work. At times lyrical in nature, one can imagine easily the Arctic Monkeys making On the Buses with Dostoyevsky their next single, starting out, Because of the steelworks/ that deafened my dad/our telly was always/too loud, so loud/it formed a second narrative /to what I was reading/ up in my room/in my late teens /Id have Hemmingway and Kojak,/Alias Smith and Jones and Poe. There is mastery of the art of Poetry Verite: kitchen sink verse. Hattersley delivers a realistic depiction of his life and mind; his routine; the worlds writerly and quotidian; fantasy and delusion; wonder and disillusion; magic and melancholy. The reader is drawn into a world that feels unnervingly visceral but is actually a carefully crafted reality; a universal full of love and loss, happiness and sorrow, booze and cigarettes, crime and punishment, bathos and pathos, metaphor and literalism, capture and release. Above all else, what is retained through the one hundred plus pieces within Back of Beyond is a tremendously strong sense of the satirical, the self-deprecatory, an eye for the outright comical, all of which is encompassed by Remembering Denisss Eyes, a pitch-black satire of a balaclavaclad bank robber who, The last time I saw him,/years later, years ago,/hed just tried to strangle his ex-wife,/had been stopped by/his ten-year-old daughter./He was running toward Darfield/like a windup toy/with a pair of kitchen scissors/ sticking between his shoulder blades.
41
Much of Hattersleys work is informed by outright pathos - tragedy laid bare without frills or sentiment and made all the more powerful for this. Never bettered in this regard is Splinter, an elegy to Hattersleys mother, and I got it with the tweezers/and pulled it straight out, no messing,/and my mother gave a sigh of relief.
Most tellingly Hattersley offers, It was never diagnosed manic-depressive./It was never found guilty of a thing. concluding with trademark understated elucidation, It was completely unprepared/for assault from above by an ashtray. All life lies herein. I do not fear hyperbole when I state that Spiders represents a work of genius worthy of collaboration between Roald Dahl and W. H. Auden. Finally, in all senses, is Sunrise, entitled with typical perspicacity as it represents an emergence from the nocturne of the back of beyond into the world writ large; an extrospective piece stating with surety of touch that, Nobody said/they wanted this/war all the time,/they werent asked./The worlds full/of empty stomachs,/theyll have to stay like that./ Family viewings making a comeback. This is a book that demands to be bought, whether you love or hate poetry, in fact particularly if you hate poetry. This anthology should be compulsory reading, from the back of beyond to the wild blue yonder. G. P.KENNEDY
All life lies herein. I do not fear hyperbole when I state that Spiders represents a work of genius worthy of collaboration between Roald Dahl and W. H. Auden.
Eight years later she was full of cancer, drugged up, surrounded by cards and flowers,/fussed over by strangers in uniforms./We took her home for the last month, she insisted./They cant make a proper cup of tea here, she said,/its no wonder everyones badly. Deserving of special mentions are Spiders, by far the longest piece, and Sunrise, the final poem of the book. Spiders is series of fifty-nine couplets offering a detached reflection on life, through the missed opportunities and inadequacies of a freshly squashed spider. The piece is a perfect example of displacement in that Hattersley makes, perhaps finds, shortcomings and disappointments more palatable when seen as those of the crushed spider, who acts surely as a metaphor of hope, It never saw itself changing or felt any need to./It never said: No more excuses./ later,/It never wrote an essay on the works of Alexander Pope./It never filled in an application form./and,/It never got sentimental at Christmas./It never thought the carpet and curtains clashed.
Human Geography Colin Watts

( Driftwood Publications 7, IBSN: 1904420-14-1) There is food and philosophy in Colin Watts second poetry collection, Human Geography, Driftwood Publications 7, IBSN: 1-904420-14-1 and sometimes the two are woven seamlessly together. There is also an exploration of the wretched betrayals of adolescence and a description of a childs first love: the obligatory pash of boarding school life and the feel of Latin in the mouth, but
42
whether the Liverpool poet is looking back at the past, sideways at the present or towards a water-rationed future, he has an original take on everything he chooses as a subject. A shape-shifters son mother a sedate daffodil, father an oscillating force of energy who makes a fatal mistake when he turns into a megabyte just before a computer crash falls in love and wants to settle down, but as what? We drifted for a while, seeking our best fit: the hands/of Christiaan Barnard, scampi and chips in a basket,/a brass three-eights Whitworth bolt and patent lock-nut. In they end they settled, as so many of us does, for a side-by-side life in suburbia and it doesnt seem such a bad bargain. The precocious hero of Censored, however, is doomed to a more tragic fate. Born with a sensitive tongue that can detect the origins of each grain of wheat in breakfast cereal, and of such length and dexterity that kisses are a commodity to be hawked at fairgrounds, fames and riches are inevitable. So too are the fanatics who: Tore my living from my mouth with tongs,/Stabbed and stabbed it with their knives,/Hurled it flailing, to their silent dogs. The burden of being an outsider is examined again when Watts looks at the life of an illegal rabbit, trying to survive by performing in the underground cabaret until new regulations about dancing on your head make even that impossible. His only protector stealing his carrot vouchers and getting rich on rabbit skin coats stands alongside the Home Secretary and immigration officers in a queue of abusers. Watts is a member of the Dead Good Poets Society; a loose gathering of artists that prove poetry in Liverpool is alive and well and not confined either to the 60s or
former members of The Scaffold. The author has no illusions about what will happen to this, his second collection for Driftwood Publications, a vibrant small press based in Merseyside. Two and a half million copies of Mills and Boon romances, remaindered and pulped, line the M6 toll bypass to give drivers a smoother ride. He confidently expects that his own small opus will shortly be cushioning a modest garden path in inner city Liverpool.
Whether the Liverpool poet is looking back at the past, sideways at the present or towards a waterrationed future, he has an original take on everything he chooses as a subject
If he were right, it would be nice to think that feet will saunter across not just rhyme, rhythm and wit, but also on the date stamps of hundreds of libraries. It may take more than a review to convince you to spend 7 on 61 pages of poems by a poet of whom you have never heard, but Colin Watts is worth reading and worth ordering from the library. And if you were to do that, then another borrower might chance on the man who turns into a dog and Goyas farting, foulmouthed Maya and the rest of the rich community of characters crowding Watts imagination. BRIDGET WHELAN
43
countryside and into her husbands ancestral home, Eagle Pond Farm. Her tone remains descriptive but creates a more emotional landscape in the first person: I move from room to room,/a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it/bump against each window./My people are not here, my mother/and father, my brother. I talk/to the cats about the weather. (from Room to Room)
Kenyon exposes her life to the reader as do, say, Plath or Sexton, but the language is plain and low-key
I often catch a sense of Kenyon being alone, on the edge of panic yet strangely calm. Is Eagle Pond Farm always this still, haunted place? Kenyon is religious and she occasionally quotes from scripture, appearing to be struggling with something within herself; and sometimes chastises herself for not doing enough.
Bloodaxe World Poets 3 Let Evening Come SELECTED POEMS Jane Kenyon
(2002, ISBN 1-85224-697-9, 8.95, Bloodaxe Books) Jane Kenyon is a Canadian poet whose work appears straightforward and primarily nature-based. For example, For the Night (the final six lines of twelve): Last light moves/through cracks in the wall,/over bales of hay./And the bat lets/ go of the rafter, falls/into black air. We learn that the poet has moved to the
The poems work well as separate pieces but read as a body of work the mystery of what is really troubling her accumulates. It is affecting because, whilst the poems contain particular detail that can become metaphorical, Kenyon does not provide easy answers. One might expect to hear that she is broken-hearted, or that someone has died, but these conventional solutions are not offered. However, Bloodaxe provides two essays from a friend and from Kenyons husband - which do propose a solution. Kenyon died in 1995 of cancer, shortly after taking care of her father, who also died of cancer. She spent much of her life living with bi-polar disorder (BPD, or manic depression). I would urge that you read the poems
44
first and then return to these opening commentaries. After having read the introductory essays I found on a second reading that the opening poem, For the Night (above) now contained all manner of gloom, which had not been apparent initially. So, delay the essays; they may cast too much shadow over the poetry. In her later work Kenyon does address her bi-polar disorder, at one point listing all the drugs she has taken, noting that the powdery ones smell/ like the chemistry lab at school/ that made me hold my breath. She also expresses her frustrations at the way her body acclimatises to various medications: We try a new drug, a new combination/of drugs, and suddenly/I fall into my life again/like a vole picked up by a storm/ then dropped three valleys/and two mountains away from home./I can find my way back. I know/I will recognise the store/where I used to buy milk and gas (from Back) Notice echoes of the falling bat? In Having It Out with Melancholy she displays a number of responses to illness. She is angry: 3. Suggestion from a Friend/You wouldnt be so depressed/if you really believed in God. And she is over-whelmed: 4. Often/Often I go to bed as soon after dinner/as seems adult/(I mean I try to wait for dark)/in order to push away/from the massive pain in sleeps/frail wicker coracle. Kenyon exposes her life to the reader as do, say, Plath or Sexton, but the language is plain and low-key. It is not therapeutic writing, nor wildly confessional. The writing is precise and feels reduced as though she has boiled a thought down to its essential few
words. This Selected (from five of her collections) also contains translations of Anna Ahkmatova, and an interview. It is enjoyable for the reader interested in exploring a sense of place - in a countryside that does not belong to Hughes or Heaney (!), as well as for the contemporary reader with spiritual concerns and a liking for plain talk. Despite Bloodaxes decision to open the blurb with a fan-fare to her illness, the poems are accessible regardless of your experience of mental health or ill health. Dont mistake Let Evening Come for maudlin poetry. Amongst other topics, Kenyon gives rigorous yet moving accounts of her experience of friendship, and of middle age. At times there are even glimpses of optimism, as with Here: I feel my life start up again,/like a cutting when it grows,the first pale and tentative/root hair in a glass of water. CATH NICHOLS REVIEWERS
Clare Reddaway writes scripts for theatre and radio, and stories for children. She has had a childrens animation series idea optioned by Lion Television, and two of her radio plays have been developed for Radio 4. She now lives in Bath with her daughter. G. P. Kennedy is Reviews Editor for Incorporating Writing. Cath Nichols is a freelance journalist. Her first poetry pamphlet is Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood). Kate Parrinder has an MA in Literary Translation from UEA and is a regular reviewer for Incorporating Writing. Bridget Whelan is a freelance journalist, Bridget has been an agony aunt, a researcher for investigative journalist Paul Foot and contributor to Miriam Stoppards Daily Mirror health and personal advice column.
45 Kenneth
Article by Jess Greenwood
Tynan
photo by Ida Kar
Contemporary culture bears an awkwardly dichotomous attitude towards criticism. On the one hand, we are obsessed by it. Our political attitude since September 11th 2001 has been characterised by an infinite number of armchair critics, the number of regular bloggers worldwide citizen journalists who answer to nobody is set to reach 150m by the end of 2006. And we have unleashed a new concept the manyheaded hydra that is the cult of celebrity. All hopefuls are generously allowed their fifteen minutes (or fifteen megabytes) of fame before being ruthlessly lampooned by anyone and everyone on the grounds of being too thin, too fat, too old, or worsetoo over. On the other hand, critics themselves those bold enough to justify their opinions for a living are held in little regard. In a fast-moving society, we are obsessed by the doers, not the thinkers. Whilst a food
critic like AA Gill can still make or break the reputation of a restaurant, we are more likely in thrall to Gordon Ramsay, to Marco Pierre White, to Jamie Oliver, the all-swearing, rough-and-tumble geniuses on the front line.Tynan never entirely cleansed himself of the desire to return to the fray.
His theatrical fingerprint is inextricably bound with the Angry Young Men
Kenneth Tynan, whilst arguably the greatest theatre critic of the last century, embodied this dichotomy: a natural critic, yet an aspiring protagonist; a sneering cynic, yet a star-struck devotee; a belligerent thrill-seeker, yet a confused, insecure weakling. Whilst attending Oxford University, where he developed both a taste and a
46
reputation for hedonism, Tynan devoted his spare time to directing. However, following his dismissal in 1950 from a production of Cocteaus Les Parents Terribles at the insistence of the leading lady, he withdrew into criticism, fusing his knowledge of the theatre with a rapier wit to wield an acid-tongued power over the London theatre scene. John Gielgud, speaking of his reviews, said: Theyre wonderful when it isnt you. Only verbose when verbosity proved a point, Tynan was capable of blanket assassination in one brutal phrase. One need not go further than to quote his description of Orson Welles performance in Othello as Citizen Coon. His theatrical fingerprint is inextricably bound with the Angry Young Men, who represented a shift not only in the British theatre tradition, but in British culture as a whole, in their move away from post-
war, slightly hysterical schmaltz towards a grittier form of expression labelled the kitchen sink drama. They were characterised only by a general dissatisfaction with the status quo, and railed on behalf of the working classes against that most nebulous of enemies, The Establishment, despite many boasting a middle class upbringing, and, like Tynan, an Oxbridge education.
Tynan was capable of blanket assassination in one brutal phrase

Despite his involvement in this worthy and dogmatic movement, the duality of Tynans nature led him to embrace wholeheartedly the high living of fifties and sixties London. His antiestablishment stance ostensibly reached
Oh! Calcutta!
47
its peak than when he became the first person ever to say the word fuck on British television although this seems more characteristic of his own work. Later in life, it appeared that Tynan was less concerned with the establishment than with the sly mockery of the prudish middle classes. Oh! Calcutta!, his erotic review, boasted a title which was a dirty pun in French (of which Tynan was proud), and was written in conjunction with luminaries such as John Lennon and Samuel Beckett. Tynan never entirely cleansed himself of the desire to return to the fray. When Sir Laurence Olivier (then, plain Larry) appointed him to the task of literary manager or dramaturg of the National Theatre, it was widely rumoured that this was a tactical move on behalf of the British theatre to put an end to Tynans devastating reviews. If they had expected any abatement of the controversy that Tynan courted, they were sorely mistaken. Despite his inarguable eye for talent he championed a young Tom Stoppard whilst at the National his courage in his own convictions caused rifts, for example his dogged backing of Rolf Hochuths Soldiers, which condemned Winston Churchill for his role in the bombing of Dresden. When he left the National Theatre in 1972, he was virtually shunned by the mainstream and eventually moved to California with his wife and family in 1976. It was at this point that his obsession with stardom became apparent. His letters bombarded stars from Marlon Brando to elderly silent movie star Louise Brooks, with whom he had a well-documented affair. Collections of these letters and a biography have since been issued by his wife, Katherine, who confronts her husbands
inconsistencies with an endearing postmortem curiosity, despite evidence of his infidelity and dissatisfaction with their marriage.
Tynan never entirely cleansed himself of the desire to return to the fray
One of Tynans early letters reveals some deep-seated characteristics that could help to explain his inconsistencies. I am so occupied with analyzing my own reactions and studying my own attitude, he writes, that I hear, and see - but do not absorb what goes on around me. Despite the many different phases through which Tynans life passed, professional or otherwise, it seems debatable whether the roar of the crowd ever rose louder than the noise of his internal demons. And that, perhaps, is the critical dichotomy.
Jess Greenwood graduated from Birmingham University with a BA (Hons) in English and Italian, Shes travelled throughout Europe and now lives in London. She is currently staff writer at Contagious Magazine, a leading authority on branding, design, technology and popular culture. In addition to this, she submits regular articles to various publications and websites.
Sunday, October 1st, 1.30pm onwards Kings Hall, Ilkley

Ilkley Literature Festival, in association with Bazm-E-Tadeeb International, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, The Incwriters Society and Leeds University Creative Writing Course, is holding a dual-language mushaira. This traditional Urdu poetry event, in which the artists vie for the audiences vocal favour, will contain a range of contemporary work by both Urdu and English artists drawn from Britain and South Asia. Aslam Kamal, from Lahore, poet, painter, short story writer and novelist, will take the Urdu lead and Michele Roberts, the wide-ranging Anglo-French author and intelllectual will be the lead English-speaking contributor. They will head up a sparkling line-up of established and new writers from two great poetic cultures. Come and experience an exciting, ground-breaking, cross-cultural literary event! The term, poetry performance will take on a whole new meaning!
Mushaira
14, North View Street, Keighley, West Yorkshire, BD20 6AD Tel.: 01535 606 554 mobile: 07977517761 email: tadeebuk@hotmail.co.uk or helen@goodway53.fsnet.co.uk
Bazm-E-Tadeeb International
49
Flax Books wants fresh prose and poetry from Lancashire and Cumbrian writers. Litfest is launching a digital and print publishing programme to showcase talented yet underexposed writers from the region. Our aim is to highlight the contemporary voices of this diverse region of England. We are looking for writers who are as thought-provoking, stimulating and challenging as the culture of the area. The first prose e-anthology will be launched at the November 2006 Litfest. From then on, they will be quarterly. The print programme will focus in depth on fewer writers. Deadline for the prose anthology Friday 4th August, and for poetry Friday 8th September. See the new writing section on our website for more details and submission guidelines. http:// www.litfest.org For more information, phone 01524 62166 Are you a writer based in Lancashire or Cumbria? If you would like to sign up to receive regular information about Litfests new programme of professional development and publishing activities, complete the form on www.litfest.org. We aim to support writers in the region to identify their career aspirations and equip them with the skills and knowledge to make the most of any opportunities that lie ahead. We will not pass on your details to any third party without your permission. At the end of July there will be a draw for a 50 book token, as thanks for your cooperation. For more information, call us on 01524 62166. THE LONG AWAITED NEW BOOK FROM COURTTIA NEWLAND For more information on Peepal Tree Press reply to: hannah@peepaltreepress.com Visit our bookstore and website at: http:// www.peepaltreepress.com Music for the Off-Key presents Tales of the Unexpected for those who like their fiction surreal: A middle-aged man with a guilty taste for schoolgirls seeks a way to end his shame; a young African boy confronts his bullying classmates with a surprising outcome; a sculptor has an odd request from a Japanese client Drawing inspiration from Hammer House of Horror to Roald Dahl, to everyday life in West London, Newland moulds the literary and the popular,
Industry News and Opportunities

reinvigorating the classic, short story form in his new collection, Music for the Off-Key; Twelve Macabre Short Stories. There is a delight in the dark, the grotesque and the uncanny as Newland sidesteps the expectations of mainstream publishers and booksellers by exciting his fans and introducing new readers to his latest book of offbeat stories. Never judgementaland certainly never apologetic, Newland skillfully challenges modern day perceptions of what it means to be Black in Britain. A long awaited collection from an outstanding storyteller. New Nation Music for the Off-Key introduces new tales in a style of Black British writing that takes us from the West Side Stories as featured in Newlands debut novel, The Scholar to add a quirky dimension. As Niall Griffiths, author of Wreckage, calls them: Dark, compelling, twisted and grim in all the best ways possible With the texture of urban folktale, the monsters they feature crawl from sexual obsession, prejudice, and other forms of hate. This is powerful, intense and engaging writing. The Reader Blog is up and running! Go to The Reader website to check out our new Reader blog, launched this week. www.reader.co.uk. There will be book reviews, book recommendations, book rants and rages, news of Reader events, reports and news from Reader participation and promotional projects, and plenty more besides. If you have comments or queries about our blogs then do let us know by emailing readers@liv.ac.uk Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006 Judges: Vicki Feaver, plus the editors of Smith/ Doorstop Books Entrants submit a collection of poems (16-24 pages). Up to five winners, who have their work published as pamphlets. They can submit further poems for consideration for a full collection. Share of 1,000 cash prize. Published under the Smith/Doorstop imprint. Closing date: last posting, 31 October 2006 Entry fee 24 per collection - good reduction for magazine subscribers. Full rules and entry form from The Competition
50
Administrator, The Poetry Business, Byram Arcade, Westgate, Huddersfield HD1 1ND, UK, tel 01484 434840. email mailto:edit@poetrybusiness.co.uk. Or visit our website: http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/ comp2000.htm . CHROMA - CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS AND QUEER WRITING COMPETITION Reply to: editor@chromajournal.co.uk / saradha@chromajournal.co.uk Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal Publishing and Promoting the Work of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans Writers and Artists Chroma is the UKs only queer literary and arts journal. Launched in 2004 and funded by Arts Council England, the journal has already been praised for its overall breadth of originality and striking visual content. You can subscribe at: http://www.chromajournal.co.uk/ordering Queer Writing Competition - Chroma has launched its first International Queer Writing Competition. The competition has three categories - Poetry, Short Story, and the Transfabulous Award - and has over 1,000 in cash prizes. All winners will be published in Chroma, and two winning entries will be taken to the ProudWORDS Writing Festival in Newcastle in October 2006. Deadline: 10 September, 2006. For all entry details, see: http:// www.chromajournal.co.uk/writingcompetition Call for Submissions Chroma is still seeking submissions for Issue 5. The theme is COMPETITION and were looking for stories, poems, and artwork that are interpretations (literal, abstract, or otherwise) of that theme. Some suggestions: Sibling rivalry, games we play, winning, losing, fighting, sports fantasies, mistresses and masters, competing in relationships, in the family, amongst friends. We strongly recommend that you read the journal before submitting (buying a copy is encouraged, too!). Were looking for work that is edgy and lyrical, challenging and risky. Deadline: 15 Sept 2006. Please see submission guidelines at: http:/ /www.chromajournal.co.uk/submissions Please contact the editors with any questions. Shaun Levin, Editor: editor@chromajournal.co.uk Saradha Soobrayen, Poetry Editor: saradha@chromajournal.co.uk or: queerchroma@yahoo.co.uk
English Association Poetry Prize The Panel of Judges is Andrew Motion, Peter Porter and Deryn Rees-Jones. Full details can be found at www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/fpp.html SUBMISSIONS WANTED: NEW WRITING SUNDAY, LONDON EC1 Reply to: teninabedtheatre@yahoo.co.uk Ten In A Bed Theatre are currently looking for scripts to perform at New Writing Sunday. New Writing Sunday was launched on Sunday 30 July at the Clerkenwell Theatre on Exmouth Market, EC1. Two new plays were premiered and the event sold out. After this great success, we will now be performing two new pieces regularly for one Sunday afternoon every month, and we are currently looking for submissions. If you are a budding writer and would like your writing to be considered for performance at New Writing Sunday, please follow the submissions procedure below: SUBMISSIONS PROCEDURE If you are intending to submit a script to New Writing Sunday, please do so by mail only. Please enclose a half-page synopsis, cast list, and a brief covering letter with full contact details and record of any previous performance. Please also include a stamped addressed envelope, with the correct postage for its return. We will accept script submissions from all ages. We will also accept excerpts and works-in-progress, as well as short and full-length plays. Sketches, sit-coms and radio plays will also be considered. However, we will not accept hand written scripts, scripts submitted by email, musicals, pantomimes, filmscripts, novels or poetry. We will endeavour to read and return your script within 3-6 months. Your script will be read by at least two company members, who will submit written feedback. If you are successful we will contact you to arrange a meeting. If you are not, we will return your script in the SAE provided. If you do not include a SAE with your submission, your script will be recycled, if not successful. We especially welcome submissions from those who live in the EC1 postcode area. Submissions should be addressed to: FAO: Script Submissions, Ten In A Bed Theatre Company, 26 Market Place, East Finchley, London N2 8BB. All enquiries (not scripts) can be emailed to: teninabedtheatre@yahoo.co.uk
Calling all writers, readers, publishers and journalists
Subscribe to Incorporating Writing today email: incwriters@yahoo.co.uk receive it or lose out free and informed
www.incwriters.com

Incorporating Writing Issue Vol 4

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Incorporating Writing Issue Vol 4

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

incorporating writing

Issue 3 Vol 4 PLAYWRIGHTS & CRITICS

Wrestling with the writer:

COMPETITION GIVEAWAY PAGE 4

G.P. Kennedy looks at being a critic and being appointed as an Editor.

Interviews The Right Stuff

Kevin Berger talks with playwright and actor, Sam Shepard.

Articles Wrestling with the writer

Columns ODonnell on Donaghy

Andrew ODonnell discusses the work of

Sharon Sadle drifts down the greatest river of all.

Artwork Perfect Eye

Cover artist, Lisha Rooney exhibits some of her work.

Reviews Competition News and Opportunities

Playwrights and Critics

CALL FOR WRITERS

with the writer

a poetry tour, with Pat Borthwick

The Right Stuff: Sam Shepard

achievement from winning a roping contest in a rodeo.

Sam Taylor Wood

Advertising here is cheaper than you think

For further information email:

...From Page 19.

22 Remarkably, Shepard forged his own concentrated, explosive language.

Kevin Berger is Salons features editor. http:// www.salon.com/

Lisha Aquino Rooney

Lisha Aquino Rooney

Lisha Aquino Rooney

Lisha Aquino Rooney

Recommended Read The Map Maker Jim Mangnall

See No Evil Michael Ridpath

Back of Beyond - New and Selected Poems Geoff Hattersley

Human Geography Colin Watts

Article by Jess Greenwood

photo by Ida Kar

Tynan was capable of blanket assassination in one brutal phrase

Sunday, October 1st, 1.30pm onwards Kings Hall, Ilkley

Industry News and Opportunities

Calling all writers, readers, publishers and journalists

Potrebbero piacerti anche