Author Sophie Hannah was one of the highlights at the conference. Photo – press picture for the Writing Conference.

Rather than have to unpack the hundreds of boxes sitting in my new home, I decided instead to go to the Writers’ Toolkit – a writer networking conference in Birmingham. It was a good decision. The trip had been planned for a while and was a birthday present to my girlfriend, which suggests that my present buying has become more pragmatic with age or that I’ve finally found the right match. (If she accepts a night out at Lakeside for the arrows as her Christmas present, then she’s definitely the one.)

The conference was organised by Jonathan Davidson, who I’d met previously when interviewing Tommy Wieringa as part of the Go Dutch project, and involved four sessions. The choices I opted for were; De-mystifying the Digital for Writers, Pitching Ideas, Understanding Publishing and The Fine Art of Editing. To ensure we got our money’s worth, my girlfriend went for four separate sessions. These were then discussed afterwards in the mammoth queue leading out of the Bull Ring car park into the oncoming football traffic.

I’ll be reviewing the event for LeftLion so I won’t go into unnecessary depth about each of the sessions but instead pick out two highlights. The first was meeting Alex Pryce who is the brains behind Poetcasting and is only situated down the road in Leicester. This website showcases various poets performing readings so that you can listen before deciding whether to go and see them. A simple yet fantastic idea, especially as poetry lends itself more to the ear than the eye. But most surprisingly, or perhaps not considering what I am about to state, it turned out that we had a mutual friend- Eireean Lorsung. Eireean is a poet from Minneapolis who came to Nottingham to study and was shocked at how little poetry there was. Since then she’s set up her own poetry night and has ensured she is associated with just about every event, night or publication in the region. She’s a truly inspirational woman and a great asset to Nottingham. I’m also waiting for her to come up with a similarly great idea as poetcasting. Maybe prosecasting would be too simple a steal…

The other highlight was meeting the author Sophie Hannah. She was absolutely hilarious and gave a dark and comical insight into the world of publishing, reminding the audience to have the humility to accept criticism but the strength in their own convictions. A tough balance but certainly true. In addition to dispelling various myths and some very salient advice regarding selecting an agent, she also kindly offered to read the first three chapters of my book and give me some feedback. She offered to do this after I explained the unfortunate experience I’d had so far with two publishers and that I was unsure whether to go with a third and smaller publisher or opt for an agent. It’s such a nice feeling when authors like Sophie genuinely go out of their way to give you a little guidance and advice when they don’t have to. It made the perfect end to a perfect day. Let’s hope that the East Midlands Writing Conference in March 2010 is as well organised and with as humorous and helpful speakers. As it is my birthday in March I’ll be expecting my girlfriend to repay the pragmatic present buying, which shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as she is helping to coordinate the conference.