Tag Archives: LeftLion

WriteLion roundup

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Summer is upon us so WriteLion will be off in search of some Yurt action. Our first stop will be the No Direction Home Festival (8-10 June) to see what Jon Ronson’s got to say for himsen (we’ll be interviewing him for the Oct issue of LeftLion). Lowdham Book Festival dominates the whole of June. Our pick of the bunch is the opportunity to heckle Jon McGregor for only being Britain’s second-best short story writer and to see if selebs like Ben Fogle can actually write. If you don’t know what Lowdham Book Festival is then we’re guessing you probably don’t even know that Southwell will be hosting its annual Library Poetry Festival (5-8 July) with the likes of Wendy Cope and that Jools Holland will be fingering the old Joanna at the Southwell Folk Festival (1-4 June) The 100 bus (pathfinder line) goes to Southwell and Lowdham.

We’re off on the tram to Hucknall Book Day on 2 June to see if John Baird, Gloria Morgan or Nick Thorn can convince us the place has more to offer than a wicked flea market. 9 June we’ll Shake the Dust at the Nottingham Playhouse for the East Midlands final then go climbing in Creswell Craggs (14 June) with hairy poet Mark Goodwin. If we’ve got £48 spare we’ll be enrolling on Victoria Oldham’s ‘Editing Your Prose’ course – just so we can spend six weeks in her lovely company. You can thank the Nottingham Writers’ Studio for that one. Pewter Press will be at Waterstones on 23 June celebrating Terri Armstrong’s debut Standing Water. They’re back again on 10 July with Frances Thimann and Heather Shaw. At this point, WriteLion would like to apologise to Frances if she took Ambridge at Katie Half-Price referring to her work as ‘biddy lit’. It was meant in the best possible taste. We think you’re a smashing writer. It’s just our Katie is a right handful.

The date for the next Poetry Café at the Flying Goose has moved from 5 June to the 14, just to keep the Beeston literati on their toes. For the Forest Fields massive it’s got to be Speech Therapy at Bar Deux. Mark Niel (28 June) is followed by Melinda Deathgoth (26 July). Both feature the delightful Raffle of Rammel as well as the opportunity to be snarled and spat at by the irrepressible John Marriott. We want his cubs.

But how can we enjoy these festivities in the knowledge that Éireann Lorsung is heading off to Belgium? In her five years she has transformed the local poetry scene. We’re not talking about the publishing house, journal, festivals and quality poetry nights. We mean those home-made cakes. Poetry readings changed forever. Now all together: ‘She’s made of sugar and spice and all things nice with a surname that sounds like a posh tea.’ Goodbye, duck. x

Taken from LeftLion Issue 47. 

What’s the Alan Moore?

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Original image by Fimb – Alan Moore, CC BY 2.0 at Wikimedia. Design James Walker. 

It’s been a truly mental and surreal week, with each night worthy of a blog. But I just haven’t got time to document my life with such precision so here’s just one thing that happened and it happened on the bog. Monday night I popped over to watch the footy with Jared Wilson (LeftLion Editor-in-Chief) as I haven’t got a telly. This basically entails both of us sitting on the couch with laptops perched on our knees, occasionally looking up at the screen when the commentator sounds a bit excited – which wasn’t often. Later on that evening I was sat upstairs on the toilet when I heard this booming voice coming out of a telephone on loud speaker in the other room. It was Alan Moore who had very kindly agreed to do an interview with LeftLion. This is an amazing scoop as he very rarely gives interviews to the media but agreed to this one as he respects the LeftLion ethos e.g. we do it for free because we love it and we take the piss whenever we can.

Prior to the interview, Jared asked me to have a look at his questions. I just laughed. Having seen Moore give a spellbinding talk at the Contemporary a week ago it was clear there was little point worrying about wording because the minute you asked him a question he would go off on one. At the Contemporary he made a particularly salient point about the dangers of turning art into a commodity (Saatchi). Art, he said, is there to offer an alternative view of reality, and that it should challenge the establishment to enable things to change. When art is reduced to a commodity it dilutes in purpose and reinforces the norm. He also talked about reclaiming pornography in Lost Girls so that sexuality becomes natural and beautiful again rather than the aggressive, male-oriented perspective that reduces this communion to the clichéd world of Nuts et al.

Having heard him give these long, eloquent observations at the Contemporary I knew it would be very difficult for Jared to pin him down to the punchy responses that are required of a 1,200 word mag interview.  The medium is the message after all. This is the problem with doing phone interviews over email. But there was no way you could cut Moore off in midsentence given his suspicion and contempt for the media. The role of the journalist here is to take those wonderful, lengthy provocative observations and break them down by interjecting questions in the mag piece so that the article has a natural flow and rhythm. The next issue of LeftLion will take a poke at the Olympics and it would have been great to ask Melinda Gebbie to redesign the Olympic rings in the style of Lost Girls as the shape lends itself to the curves of the human form. But we didn’t want to push our luck given Moore’s generosity in agreeing to the interview.

But back to the toilet. I knew Jared was going to speak to Moore that evening, I just didn’t realise he would start when I was in his bathroom. Joe Orton once said the toilet was the last refuge of the male, in Chapter 16 of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe described a corporal who found the toilet ‘marvellous’ and a place for gathering thoughts, but having inadvertently experienced this with Alan Moore booming his shamanic wisdom out in the distance, the toilet has taken on a whole new realm of meaning, an experience that will never be bettered. I suspect that the devilish Moore would find the whole episode amusing.

For info on future talks and lectures at the Nottingham Contemporary, please see their website