Feeling flash

Now, you may remember a while back me mentioning the Flash Mob Writing Competition, which I'm helping run as part of this year's Chorlton Arts Festival. Well, you have ten days in which to enter, so snap to it. All the details you need to know are on our fabulous website, which now comes complete with some rather gruesome photographic evidence of what each of the five Flash Mob judges looks like. I've obviously been at the juice. Dave looks like one of his rabbits caught in the headlights. Tom, according to Ben, looks like "a sexy magician". Fats looks menacing. Ben looks slightly menacing too, come to think of it.

Any road, to help plug the contest, I've written a feature for none other than the fantabulous Creative Times. The feature is about flash fiction. It includes quotes from flash fiction authors and everything. In recognition of the genre, I was asked to submit less than 500 words and you can read the results here.

Rehearsal of fortune

Theatre. Blogging. Just two of the things I like.

And, lo, if Library Theatre Company hasn't only gone and combined the two, offering the good bloggerati of Manchester the chance to go behind the scenes of the first of three site-specific productions the company will stage in the summers of 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Paste 200 words about a recent thespian outing into the comments on the post here (where you'll also find all the details), and you could be one of four writers privy to a rehearsal of Charles Dickens' Hard Times at the company's temporary Zion Centre home in Hulme, with a further invitation to a dress rehearsal in June at the newly renovated Murray's Mills in uber-cool Ancoats. In return, you write about your experiences for the Library blog, yeah?


Murray's Mills, Ancoats, Manchester, 30 x 100cm © Glenn Clarke.

...and another Ashworth

Now, here's another interesting event that's been flagged up to me by my pal Library Sue: Born, Not Made?, a discussion about whether or not creative writing can be taught. It takes place next Tuesday (12 April) at 6pm in City Library's fabulous Becker Room (where we had our recent Flash Mob photo-shoot, and, coincidentally, where the pic in my last blog post was also taken).


The event will see the lovely Sherry Ashworth (novelist, senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-founder of Hidden Gem Press) chairing a discussion, about whether writers are born or made, between Jane Rogers (MLF Is There A Novelist In The House? judge, creative writing lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and author of eight novels including Island, The Voyage Home and Mr Wroe's Virgins) and her "protegee" Rachel Genn (whose debut novel The Cure is out on Constable & Robinson on 26 May). The debate will revolve around the student/teacher relationship, the ups and downs of taking a writing course, the shared enthusiasms and the issue of influence, and there will also be readings.

Please go because I can't!

One Ashworth...

You know me, always hanging out with the literati, right? So today, I had coffee or lunch, I'm not sure (I had coffee; she had lunch), with Jenn Ashworth, pictured here at the Bugged launch at Manchester Literature Festival 2010. I wanted to find out about some of her current projects, of which you will be privy to more very shortly right here. Happens I'm also just in the middle of Jenn's debut novel, A Kind Of Intimacy. You don't need to say it; I'm a slow reader: Jenn's second offering, Cold Light, is out at the end of this month, and she's well on the way to a first draft of her third.


For a sneak preview of the second, and possibly the third, of Jenn's books, get yourself over to the Martin Harris Centre at the Manchester University, tomorrow (Thursday 7 April) at 6.30pm. As writing fellow for the University's Centre for New Writing, Jenn will be reading some of her work and answering questions from the floor, alongside poet Paul Batchelor. You should go: it'll be worth the trip!

Living the highlight

I am a highlight. A highlight in this month's wonderful online zine Blank Pages. There's its cover below. It reminds my of an album by The The. I don't suppose many of you remember The The. Before your time probably. They were quite good; a bit weird, maybe, but quite good nonetheless.


Anyway, I am very much honoured to have been furnished with this "highlight" entitlement. Huzzah for me! But why?, you ask. Well, I've written a feature in the latest Blank Pages, out today, all about blogging and just how ace being a blogger in the rainy city can be and just how ace one of my fellow bloggers is. She's called Hayley Flynn; you should check out her stuff. Her Skyliner picture set is just getting going, but it promises to make hers a go-to blog. And her misplaced mail stories are fab; they're the letter equivalent of my list collection, which I'm aiming on doing more with soon. And which grew again this morning with "loaf / crumpets / Actimel / 3 meals / veg? / mixed salad / sweets / or fruit and cream". Lovely.