Review time

The last full day of Litfest was devoted to prose, 'words in their best order', and the order was very very good. The sun was shining, and the writers sat in the huge window of the LICA building at Lancaster University and read and talked and discussed and we sat and listened and asked questions and applauded.

Below are some reviews from the day,which should also be available at www.litfest.org, along with others from the week. They include: Claire Massey and the story walk of The Stone King, the Flax Landscape Showcase featuring Naomi Kruger, Sarah Schofield and Ian Hill; Rodge Glass and Alan Bissett in conversation; and M.J Hyland and Anneliese Mackintosh. I'd also like to make mention of the lovely And Other Stories. I wasn't down to review them on the day, and had to leave part way through: spectacularly bad timing. I did hear Andrew Bromfield read from his translation of the Oleg Zaionchkovsky novel, Happiness is Possible, though, which was sublime. A vivid, chaotic slice of contemporary Moscow with echoes of Chekhov. It's on my Christmas list...

But let us wait no longer. Please read on to gain a taste of what it was like at the all singing, all dancing, All Day Prose Shindig of Litfest 2012!

Claire Massey: The Stone King 

I’d not been to Williamson Park before, and it was a beautiful day for discovery. Sunshine, crisp air and a fantastic view out over Lancaster and the sea as we met above the Ashton Memorial meant that the morning’s story walk had an excellent start.

Claire Massey is known for her fairy tales, and today she became a Pied Piper of Lancaster, leading the children on a journey of discovery around the twisting paths of the park, reading each chapter of her new story in the place it was set.

Rose is counting up to 100 for a game of hide and seek, but the numbers wake the Stone King and he takes away her brother. It is up to Rose to find him, but what can she do? By way of the lake and the shelter, the darkest part of the woods and sundial, she finds help from a stone butterfly and a fishing boy, a tiny lady spinning moss rope and the leaves falling from the trees. Woven into the narrative is the story of Williamson Park itself, and its place in the history of Lancaster.

Claire was reading from a copy of her story which had been printed and bound to be an object of beauty itself. The cover was decorated with a fan of autumn leaves, and the hand cut pages could just be seen as Claire turned them, adding to the magic of the gathering. The children were intrigued, trying to catch glimpses inside. They were all caught up in the story, glancing over their shoulders as if to catch sight of the stone beast transforming from the smooth pebble, listening for the whispering of the leaves as they gave their cryptic clues, and waiting with bated breath for quarry walls to break apart as the prow of the stone ship forced its way out. And the adults were no less involved. I can promise you that, once you’ve heard the story, you will never see the front of the Ashton Memorial in the same way again.

And you can hear the story as you follow the trail around the park, even though Claire herself might not be there for your visit. The story has been recorded, and is available to hire on mp3 players at the park. For more information, come to http://www.litfest.org/storywalking/

Flax Landscapes: Naomi Kruger, Sarah Schofield and Ian Hill

I love landscape writing. I love how the writing becomes as much a meditation on being as about the visual sights being described to us. And the writing in this showcase demonstrated how this can be approached from different angles, yet still arrive in much the same place.

Sarah Schofield lives just down the road from me. Her story, The Key Safe, is set in and around the Ainscough flour mill in Burscough, and the familiarity of place gave the piece, for me, an interesting twist. The red brick of the flour mill dominates the village as you approach by train, as the central character does in Sarah’s story, but is curiously absorbed within the village once you are there. In the story, it becomes a symbol of childhood, with its secrets and unfinished business, and also the catalyst for moving on. At one point, Abi recalls the time in Venice when she rejects her boyfriend’s proposal and ‘he seems to look at her as a person furtively checks their watch.’ By returning to the mill, and particularly to the key safe within, Abi’s personal clock is set ticking once more.

Ian Hill’s contribution, Instar, reminded me of the wonderful Kathleen Jamie, not least with his pinpoint descriptions of the birds. A pair of herons ‘stalk the shallow pools like elderly vagrants in search of coins.’ A marsh harrier is like ‘a rower heading for open water.’ From the liminal places of the shore, and the special resonance it has in his own family history, Ian takes us via the metamorphosis of butterflies and moths to a memory from Ian’s own youth, when he climbed at Trowbarrow Quarry. The landscape which helped to form his own mental geography is now having its impact on the stretching boundaries of his sons’ development. I was left with the sense of constancy of place allied to constant change, a circle which closes yet ripples ever outwards.

We finished with Naomi Kruger’s short story, Causeway, set at Sunderland Point. The narrator, up with her baby for a nighttime feed, allows a random memory to float up to the surface of her mind, an overnight stay which ended in silent discomfort. As she traces over the events of the long ago visit to the house on the far side of the causeway, we are absorbed in the sense of the outsider viewing a landscape to which her friend so clearly belongs. And as the sea covers the causeway, the narrator is trapped in the otherness of this world, wishing for home and the ‘smell of washing powder coming off the clothes on the radiators, the plastic windows that seal rooms off like Tupperware.’

All of the pieces, as became clear in the post-reading discussion, share a sense of unfinished business. Landscapes are deeply entwined with our memories: they act as a route back into the past, back to the sense of our own younger selves. They form layers through which we can access the past and present, and sometimes see the way forward into the future.

The three stories can be downloaded as an ebook, The Language of Footprints, from www.litfest.org. It comes in epub format, so you might have to download Calibre as well http://calibre-ebook.com/. It's pretty easy. In that I could do it, so you can too. They will soon be available on iBooks and Amazon as well.

Rodge Glass and Alan Bissett

Review by Graeme Shimmin

First half: Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs by Rodge Glass

Rodge Glass came out of the tunnel well up for it and looking to do the lads proud, reading from Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs, his novel about a fictional Manchester United player called Mike Wilson who made a single first team appearance (against Oldham Athletic) at the time when Ryan Giggs and David Beckham were also making their debuts. Wilson, voted the worst ever Manchester United player, is obsessed with the man voted the best, Giggs, whom he regards as his 'nemesis' due to a misplaced pass that Wilson believes cut his career short.

Glass's high work rate impressed as he read two excerpts, first Alex Ferguson visiting the Wilson household to sign Wilson up (Glass's silky skills being complemented by some Glaswegian grit as fellow writer Alan Bissett put himself about a bit doing an uncanny impression of Sir Alex Ferguson) and second, a quick-fire dissection of the clichés that fill post-match interviews.

As Glass headed into the tunnel it appeared to be all over. He'd grabbed a cheeky lead and now surely he'd park the bus. Some fans were leaving the stadium, heads down and tears in their eyes.

Second Half: Pack Men by Alan Bissett

Whatever the gaffer had said in the changing room had clearly fired Bissett up. Anonymous in the first half, looking unsettled and seemingly with half an eye on the transfer list, he was a different player now: head up and bellowing. It was all about respect. Respect for your mates, respect for the craft, knowing you can't let the fans down.

Bissett bullied his way through the middle, leading by example. He cracked open his novel, Pack Men, and ripped into the opposition with an uncompromising passage about clashing personalities in a group of Rangers supporters down in Manchester to watch the 2008 UEFA Cup Final, the irrational views of the various characters captured perfectly by Bissett’s deadpan drawl. It was Ulysses. It was Jaws. It was alive in front of our eyes.

Incisive and penetrating, Bissett pulled the fixture around with a captain's performance that left his fans cheering.

Extra Time

It had been a game of two halves and the crowd were on edge as the fixture moved into the final period still delicately poised. It was all about who wanted it more now. The ref appeared to have lost control and the tackles were flying in. Bissett attempted speculative shots from long range, Glass sniped and harried. It wasn't just about football any more: it was about friendship; it was about society; it was about what it means to be a man. Loyalties were questioned. History beckoned. The ref blew for the end of the match. Both players slumped to the ground, exhausted.

It was going to go to penalties.

Read more from Graeme by visiting www.graemeshimmin.com. I'm reading Rodge's Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs at the moment, and will review it soon. Rodge's website is www.rodgeglass.com, and you can read the interview I did with him earlier on this blog. Alan Bissett is at www.alanbissett.com, and Pack Men is somewhere to the top of my reading list. (Alan, it would be at the top if you'd given me a copy at the reading like Rodge did ;-))

M.J Hyland & Anneliese Mackintosh

The Place of the Short Story

Anneliese Mackintosh was in good voice for the penultimate event of Litfest 2012. I mention this particularly because it was her fourteenth gig in eight days. Go, Anneliese! The story she read was a deceptively gentle love story, spoken from mother to daughter. As we followed the baby’s growth through toddlerhood and on towards teenaged rebellion, the sharpness of life ripped through, mirroring the scars from the self-harming of both parents. It’s a story that I’d like to sit down and read over again, finding more on every visit.

M J Hyland read first from Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes, shortlisted for this year’s BBC International Short Story Award, and then from Hardy Animal, an essay to be published in Granta this month, which takes on the diagnosis of MS. Both were stripped down and uncompromising: the unwelcome father with his incongruous pineapple; the unwanted disease that Hyland tried to hide. Good memoir is particularly engaging, allowing the reader/listener in on uncomfortable truths. I’m looking forward to reading the whole text.

The second part of the session was given over to discussion around the short story. They should be ‘quick and stunning, lots in small doses’, ‘one thing in one story with charged emotions.’ We talked about the power in what is not said, that it’s ok to leave stuff out. Short stories invite questions and events left hanging, and they welcome the sense of unsettling happenings. There is a gap between what people say, and what comes out. Are short stories most welcome to those with a short attention span? Is it impossible to escape into a short story in the same way that you can with a novel? How much of short story writing is cutting out the bits that tell the story? How satisfactory is an ambiguous ending?

We also touched on opportunities for publication. Kindle blurs the lines and boundaries between novels and novellas and short stories, leading to a democratisation of forms, which must be a good thing. Anneliese shared the comment from one publishing house that they ‘only bring out one collection of short stories every two years’, whilst M.J pointed out that the literary scene in the US not only embraced short fiction so much more robustly than we do here in the UK, but also paid more for it. I'm sure I wasn't the only writer in the room making a mental note to follow this one up...

You can find out more about what Anneliese is up to at www.anneliesemackintosh.com, and have a look back on this blog for my interview with her earlier on in the festival. 

For M.J Hyland, go to www.mjhyland.com. You can read Only Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes at http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Even-Pretty-Eyes-Commit-Crimes. Hardy Animals is available in Granta 120: Medicine, downloadable at http://www.granta.com/Archive/120