A Word on Word!

‘Word!’ is the longest running poetry and spoken word night in the East Midlands. Hosted at The Y Theatre in Leicester, a gorgeous venue with large round tables, red velvet chairs and bursting with a palpable creative atmosphere, Word! offers a much needed platform for poets and spoken word artists. For most of the evening it is ran as a highly organised open mic night, with slots available to any artist who gets to the venue and puts their name down by 7 that evening. Such a format gives the audience the chance to delve into different approaches and styles of writing that reading privately could never offer. Word! is then concluded with a booked headline act, and in the past has hosted such poets as Rob Gee, Joolz Denby, Malika Booker, Steve Rooney and Lucy English to name but a few.

Last night, in partnership with Staple Magazine, Word! delighted the audience with the majestic Mimi Khalvati, the founder of The Poetry School and a truly inspiring poet. She has published 6 collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. Her most recent book, The Meanest Flower, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and also Short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize. Mimi was mesmerising, and won the hearts of the audience not only with her wonderful poetry but also her kind and gentile personality, instantly putting everyone at ease and taking us on inspiring journey through her life via the medium of poetry. I came away from Word! feeling invigorated and bursting with new ideas thanks to the magic of good poetry.

For more information on Word! see here http://www.myspace.com/wordleicester

Audio Delights

Audio books have long been a passion of mine, and a form of reading I implore all literature lovers to try. While reading books generally can be quite a personal pleasure, audio books can be shared with other people, much like watching a film together. They promote multitasking, and can be enjoyed while on the move, like shopping or walking the dog. I truly believe they’re a great way of catching up on the books you’ve always wanted to read, but never found the time or for some reason or other, the inclination.

As much as I love these treats of for my ears, audio books are not without their downside. While a good reader can bring a narrative alive, adding nuance and texture to a story, a bad reader, (one that you don’t connect with or has an annoying voice, etc) can murder a good story slowly and make you lose interest in the plot, or compassion for the characters. Unlike the palpable nature of books, where you’re able to flick through the narrative at leisure, refreshing yourself on an event which may have occurred 100 pages ago, with an audio book such omnipotent power is harder to exert for fear of losing you current place. From a writers perspective, audio can be fantastic since it forces the listener to consume to every word that has been painstakingly written, nevertheless if the listener lets their mind wander while listening to a story they run the risk of losing some vital information. And finally if a story challenges writing convections like structure, the true effect can be lost in the listening of the narrative as the reader is not able to envision the text as it was originally intended.

Through my years of listening to audio I have learnt that it is important to choose the book I listen to wisely. If the author plays with time lines, structure or employs interesting postmodernist techniques to their story I will generally read the book rather than listen. There is still something very precious and intimate for me about reading a book, but listening to audio presents me with the opportunity to indulge in my passion of literature while still continuing with the day to day running of my life.

Currently I’m listening to Ian McEwan’s new novel, ‘Solar’. A true delight: his clever turn of phrase, wry and human observations bring glimpses of sunshine on the grey English day. Go on, have a listen.

On Writing

For a long time I prescribed to the notion that you’re not a writer unless you write every day. You need to find the time and space to write, even if that means getting up an hour earlier than you would normally, just so you can sit at your desk and let the ethereal words ‘flow through you’. And I tried. I really did try. But after a while I realised that many of the words I’d forced myself to write were tosh. They were not up to the standard and calibre that I knew I was capable of achieving. I was writing for the sake of it, to keep the demons at bay, rather than to represent my particular way of seeing. It was arts for arts sake, and inevitably it was unsustainable.

When I look back to the things I have written recently, the pieces that have weight, meaning and worth, they have all been stories that have come naturally to me. Pieces which I have had the smallest inkling of an idea for, and have invariably ‘written themselves’. I used to hate it when a writer would talk about how pieces write themselves, as if the act of writing is effortless and we are just the conduit for a higher power. However, I can now see there is some element of truth in that mantra. The good stories I write have all developed from the tiniest seed of an idea, which has grown into something much larger as I write it. For me, writing is a very natural and intuitive process, and I find forced creativity doesn’t produce the work that I am proud of. Work that rings with an element of self and truth. Therefore I’m trying to learn to keep my demons at bay, and be comfortable with myself as a writer, by understanding which ideas are the sparks that will grow into something bigger. I don’t want to simply write for the sake of writing, I want to produce worthwhile work. However I also recognise that I need to be better at not feeling bad when I have no such project or story on the go, for one will inevitably present itself. Well, that’s the hope at least.

At the moment, as I have no driving project propelling me forward, I have taken to editing snippets of free writing pieces I have done in the past, in the hope of creating a collection of complete pieces. In this way I hope to clear my head of the old, half finished ideas and spiritually make way for the new. Some of them may not be great, but I’d rather get them up to a certain level and then leave them, than have a mind full of muddled, segmented stories. That’s the theory anyway.