Photo by Pixabay at Pexels. 

How do you prepare to appear on a Booker panel? My technique has been to work my way through the previous winners to see if I could find a common thread. It would appear so far that the common thread is the right authors have won but for the wrong books. Out of the ones I have read so far, The Life of Pi (Yann Martel), is by far superior. Why? Because the setting is so surreal that it transported me to a situation I could never have imagined myself. In short, it was magical.

When a ship transporting his family’s zoo across the Pacific sinks, a young boy finds himself on a small lifeboat with a bengal tiger, hyena, zebra and orang-utan. The boy has to think carefully about his every action in order to survive and through this unfolds beautiful lessons in love, acceptance, and wisdom – in the most peculiar of settings. For this reason it deserved to win the coveted prize but other winners I’ve found less emotive. Yes there are beautiful passages in John Banville’s The Sea, Stanley Middleton’s Holiday sucks you into a microcosm of local life and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little managed to produce a trailer trash indictment of our times, but were they special? Did you feel tears of futility well in your eyes when you reached the last page or a new felt sense of purpose? No.

I was also unimpressed with the Booker of Bookers, Midnight’s Children. The concept is outstanding from the former Advertising guru who famously penned the ‘naughty but nice’ slogan. But I didn’t find it beautiful and I guess for a book to really take the prize it must avoid the Cartian dichotomy and hit both the body and the mind. I admired Rushdie’s ambition but it became so unnecessarily complicated that it no longer became a page turner, it became a page returner as I had to go back over passages.

I don’t suspect that reading previous winners will help me in any way on the night. Rather an excuse to indulge my reading fetish. For a moment it gave me a little control over that vast sea of literature that sweeps over us all and place them into some kind of context, an intellectual ordering that enabled me to float rather than drown.

My other plan was to read previous books by authors on the shortlist. This way I could map out some kind of literary genealogy and discuss the way in which the author’s style has developed over time and how certain themes seem to reoccur. But in trying to cram in all of this information I’ve deprived myself of the one pleasure that I read for: Relaxation. Reading is about dictating the speed, unlike every other element of my life. Reading is where I go to escape, immersing myself in worlds brought alive by carefully chosen words. So to prepare for the Booker I’m putting on the breaks. It’s back to basics. I’m going to have a bath every night with loads of bubbles and cup of tea and I’m going to read Howard Jacobsen’s The Finkler Question, my outside bet. And when the water runs cold and my toes shrivel up I’m going to put the book down and leave it until the next night.

Join me, Francis Finn, Niki Monaghan, Peter Preston, Bianca Winter and Jane Streeter for the Booker debate on Oct 12th at Arnold Library. Tickets, £6

Shindig at Jam Cafe. Photo James Walker.

As it happened it was another member of the forum, Andrew Graves (MulletProofPoet), who got us thinking about our next Scribal Gathering event (Oct 23rd at the Hockley Hustle). He performed a superb poem about superheroes living in Nottingham which would make the perfect introduction to an Alt Fiction panel we’re putting on at Scribal Gathering. We then decided that it would be great if he did a themed poem for each of the panels/readings we’re putting on that day. This was exactly the reason we put on Shindig!, knowing it would be a great networking opportunity that could lead to poets getting more work. I just didn’t think that it would be us signing up ‘our’ own acts for future events! It was Wilde who said ‘the obvious is stated by the intellectual’ and the bleeding obvious had been staring us in the face for months, we just didn’t realise it.

It’s really important, particularly in the current economic environment, that small presses support each other which is why we are so delighted with this collaboration, but it wasn’t just Nine Arches that we have befriended. One of the other open mic readers was George Ttoouli, the editor of the recently formed Polarity magazine. He has helped produce an absolutely stunning publication that includes a hilarious poetic criticism of Geoff Dyer, taking literary criticism to a much needed surreal level – something that Dyer would no doubt appreciate himself given his own unclassifiable brand of writing. We’ll be doing an interview with George and a review of the mag in a future LeftLion which just goes to show that if you leave the garret every now and again, many beautiful things will flourish.

Talking of remarkably beautiful things, Jon McGregor and Matthew Welton were in the crowd, which was a real honour. Giving up-and-coming poets a platform is one thing, but the presence of such esteemed punters is more than enough motivation to take the plunge from page to stage. Jon has kindly agreed to come and read at the next Scribal Gathering so if nobody else made contacts or collaborations by the end of the night, we certainly did.

We chose Jam Cafe because it has snug sofa’s, big fat creamy cakes, lovely staff and the closest Notts has got to a backstreet Parisian cafe. The only downside is that the performers are placed in the corner by the front window which means they perform with their back to some of the crowd. Although not ideal I don’t think it’s a problem as the audio is good quality and we wanted a generally relaxed feeling to the event.

We selected two local poets and went for Eireann Lorsung and Wayne Burrows. Wayne always gives a different reading each time, largely because he’s involved in so many projects that he’s never short of content. He’s our very own cultural Steven Fry with a remarkable breadth of knowledge that included a poetic historical timeline of Sneinton for a recent council commission. Eireann performed a kind of biographical poem of America that she’s currently working on. It’s an absolute lyrical behemoth and once more reminded me of how wide and varied poetry is. She’s a highly ambitious and driven young lady and someone who is artistically infectious and inspirational in equal measures.

Nine Arches had planned to have Roz Goddard read from her Sopranos Sonnets (yes, a poetry collection about HBO’s seminal gangster drama) but unfortunately she had to pull out and so publisher Matt Nun stepped in and filled the cafe with a broad, loud Brummie accent in a sexy set with some really comical and adult rated renditions. He was followed by Simon Turner who was absolutely brilliant with his ‘rejection letter’ poems and someone I’d like to see again, preferably back at one of our other events given that he has a tenuous Notts link that means he can be assimilated into the LeftLion PR machine.

The event culminated with music from the aptly named Simon Haiku of Hhymn who did an acoustic set with a cello thrown in for good measures, bringing proceedings to a lovely, warm end. The perfect full stop to a Sunday night. Then just when you think things can’t get any better I was given a couple of books to review for Staple, meaning my slightly heavier bag was the kind of weight I welcome on my shoulders.

More info on performers at the Shindig event