Smut and stuff

OK, so before I start getting complaints again about not updating the old blog, here you go. I've been working tres hard on the Manchester Literature Festival Blog writing posts and quizzing various writers about various things, so why not pop over and read those here.

I've also been busily squirrelling away at keeping my Wednesday promise of publishing bad words on We Hate Words. You can see that here.

Then, I've been writing another ton of short stories to submit to different zines and anthologies and wotnot and stuff and also to read at a number of upcoming spoken word events, starting with the Bad Shoes Festival this Sunday. I'm in the spotlight in the 2-2.30pm FlashTag Mcr slot in BoCho's Electrik.


And apart from all that (and other secret and not-so-secret projects), I've been frantically organising and promoting the FlashTag Smut Night, which takes place a week tonight - Wednesday 28 September, 8pm, Northern Lawn Tennis Club, Palatine Road, Didsbury. We'll be launching our collection of filthy flash fiction, Quickies: Stories For Adults, and hosting a night of dirty readings featuring our good selves and some of the contributors to the book (a book! A real-life book!).

As I say in the press release: “I’ve been gagging to run a literary-based Smut Night for ages and this seemed like the ideal opportunity – I think an evening of tongue-in-cheek saucy and romantic stories in the curtain-twitching suburbs will go down a treat!” Oo-er missus.

It's a free event and on stage will be, among others, Bristol Prize-winner and Whalley Ranger Valerie O'Riordan; Didsbury author Socrates Adams, whose debut novel Everything's Fine launches at Manchester Literature Festival in October; South Manchester-based Chris Killen, author of The Bird Room, described by The Independent as “exciting and perfectly formed”; Didsbury-based Salt New Voices poet Adrian Slatcher, and Claire Massey, whose work appears in The Best British Short Stories 2011 and Nicholas Royle’s Murmurations, which also launches at DAF (Monday 26 September, 8pm, Pizza Express, Lapwing Lane).

Our headline act is David Gaffney, the “grandmaster of flash fiction” (Bookmunch) and “one of the foremost writers in the short fiction arena” (The Short Review), and author of three critically acclaimed flash fiction collections, Sawn-off Tales, Aromabingo (which he's just lent me) and The Half-life Of Songs, plus the novel Never Never. At Smut Night, he will be reading the story he has written especially for Quickies along with some of his other work. You should so come...

Diva-lution

Ten days remain for you to hotfoot it over to Salford Quays to check out The Lowry's Warhol & The Diva show. I recommend that you do. It's really nicely curated, starting with Polaroids of each of the famous faces Andy Warhol persuaded to sit for him. Next, you move onto those famous huge bright screenprints. There's a fantastic Liza Minnelli, all black spiky fringe and shiny red mouth. There's a wonderful Debbie Harry, again red lipstick a-gogo, hung on an animal-print background which sets the picture off beautifully. There's Liz Taylor, there's Jane Fonda, there's Mick Jagger, and, of course, most famous of all, there's Marilyn Monroe - in fact, there are a few Marilyn Monroes.


The works have been borrowed from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, specially selected by curator Kate Farrell. Kate has cleverly juxtaposed the portraits with photographs of Warhol wearing a wig and make-up, himself the diva to Christopher Makos's lens, and with a really interesting video of the artist undergoing his makeover, seemingly very vulnerable and nervous. There's also a corridor-type room displaying copies of Interview magazine, which used Warhol's diva images on the cover, and this provides the context of Pop Art and serves to give the exhibition extra depth.

It's a well-rounded show, and worth the trip to the windswept wastes. And it's free. No excuse.