Book tour!

All my upcoming performance dates in one handy place... may I present "sarah-clare conlon's cache-cache book tour flyer". cache-cache is my debut poetry pamphlet, out with modernist poetry press Contraband Books very soon, and I'll be reading bits and bobs from it at all these fabulous dos! I'll try and read different extracts at different events, if that's possible, just in case you have the misfortune of being at them all. cache-cache is hide and seek in French; thanks to David Gaffney for this photo peeking through a hole in a door at Victoria Baths, where I've had the pleasure of being their first-ever writer-in-residence.

March into April

Yesterday was 1 April, so the annual event of Daily Permissible Exercises In Style – one hour of observation, from the window where I work onto the street where I live. I note down everyone who passes on foot, on bicycle, en voiture, and any birds and planes that fly over, and if no one passes I note down any other points of interest: washing on a line, flowers in bloom, cats atop walls, noises off, the weather. I then, eventually, type it all up, condense it down to a specific wordcount, and play… swapping nouns, messing about with translations, relating the “story” backwards, that kind of thing. 

This is the third year I've done it, having started during the first UK lockdown (lockdown measures legally came into force 26 March 2020, I’m sure you’ll remember), basing it on Georges Perec’s Tentativement d’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien (available in English as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris) and then sprinkling over some of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (Exercises of Style) magic. Some of the results from 2020 and 2021 will soon be available for your delight and delectation in my debut pamphlet, cache-cache, due out with Contraband Books next month! 

It's interesting, and très Perecian, to record specific places on an annual basis, and the other thing I've been doing three years running is pose for a photograph down by the river Mersey in Didsbury, Manchester, near Simon’s Bridge. The photograph is taken each year in the dying days of March by Nicholas Royle, after we met him there the first year to swap DVDs and gather wild garlic, obviously with a suitably spatially aware, socially distanced gap. Nick sits on an adjacent bench; David and I sit on the Bench Of The Two Susans, a bench bearing two plaques, both dedicated to people called Susan. 

I wrote a poem mentioning the Bench Of The Two Susans, partly written there. Will Finches Inhabit Me? appeared in The Interpreter’s House last October (submissions are currently open until 14 May, and I recommend sending something over – they are a joy to work with, taking such time and care typesetting my piece) and it has also found its way into cache-cache (you really must buy it; pre-orders available 29 April!). Pictures, top to bottom: March 2022, March 2021, March 2020.

All aboard!

In a couple of months, as April converges with May, I'll be donning my galoshes, salopettes and sou'wester and taking to the water, as I have been lucky enough to have been picked for one of the Writers Residencies on board the rainbow-hued narrowboat Furor Scribendi. This forms part of my research for the Lancashire Stories project, for which I have been commissioned to contribute a piece relating to water and waterways; I'm currently exploring lighthouses and the lives of lighthouse keepers, and thinking about shipwrecks and shorebirds, tidal bores and coastal flora…

Picture, above: Studio Morison, The RV Furor Scribendi, part of Small Bells Ring, 2020. 

Photography by Charles Emerson. Image courtesy the artists.

In related news, my poem about the painter Joan Eardley's seascapes at Catterline, where she lived up to her death, has just been published in the All Becomes Art anthology to celebrate the centenary (last year) of her birth, complete with a ripple-like blue cover – a slightly more recent version (with the inexplicably missing line breaks reinstated) will appear in a third pamphlet I've been chipping away at, and I'll be reading this and other watery pieces at an immersive art reading at Cheadle Village's Greenhouse Books on the afternoon of Sunday 13 March...

So, back to my residency afloat Furor Scribendi, I'm hoping to re-spark the strange feelings of bobbing about up and down and from side to side and the unique sounds and patterns and colours tied up with being so close to the water. We'll see what comes of it!

Here's a bit more about The RV (Research Vessel) Furor Scribendi... she's a fully functioning sculptural narrowboat operating as a living research vessel and a retreat for writers and readers, housing a floating library of short stories for members of the public to visit and borrow books from. Furor Scribendi forms part of Small Bells Ring, an artwork created by artists Heather Peak and Ivan Morison of Studio Morison, and co-commissioned by Super Slow Way and Coventry City of Culture Trust in collaboration with Lancashire and Coventry Library Services and their communities, and Canal & River Trust and British Council. In 2021, Small Bells Ring joined the Coventry City of Culture celebrations (you might have heard a feature about it on BBC Radio 4's Front Row in September) and, in 2022, the project will cruise the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, the longest canal in Britain built as a single waterway. 

Check out @Superslowway on Twitter, Super Slow Way on Facebook and @smallbellsring on Instagram for more on the project as a whole and the Small Bells Ring Writers Residencies. 

An open Open

Can’t quite believe it’s the preview weekend of an exhibition that includes work by me… the Manchester Open 2022 at HOME is now officially an open Open, and I shall be visiting tomorrow – and I’m pretty excited about it! I made a visual / concrete poem, a kind of calligram (after Guillaume Apollinaire, forefather of Surrealism and coiner of the term Cubism) that can be viewed as well as read. It's called ‘Saturnine Night’, and is an approximation of the shape of Saturn, my starsign’s ruling planet, if you’re down with that kind of thing. If you’re not down with that kind of thing, you won’t know that we’ve just like two days ago taken leave of Capricorn’s chunk of the year (as an aside, when I worked on ELLE, my lovely boss let me change the dates in the horoscopes as they weren’t quite aligned properly and made me a Sagittarius, so, y’know, life goals and all that). Anyway, if you’re not down with that kind of thing, the artwork has nothing to do with that kind of thing and lots to do with other kinds of things, including Saturday nights (one of the reasons why I’ve booked my preview slot for 7pm on a Saturday), which you’ll find out if you hop along from Monday and have a look. The pictures are of my artwork all wrapped up when I dropped it off on 11 December, plus a snippet of Saturnine Night along with a bit of Saturn, from the Twitter account Bits of Saturn (which is real trippy if you scroll through lots, like I just did) taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which man… Anyway, even if you don’t want to have a look at my planetary exploration, it’s one of 400 artworks (chosen from a staggering 2,271 entries!), so there’s plenty more to feast your eyes upon. The exhibition is free and runs from Monday 24 January until Sunday 27 March, and during the first five weeks you can put forward your three favourite pieces for The People’s Choice Award. Book your timeslot here, and enjoy...

Looking back, looking forward

Oooh it's the last day of 2021, so let's round up the bit since we posted our last missive on 19 October, shall we? As anticipated, I performed at Verbose, on the open mic, and at Sophie Herxheimer's Index launch with zimZalla, and then I was invited to perform again at Verbose, this time as a headliner, at the festive powwow in mid December; other headline duties went to Dave Haslam, reading extracts from his Art Decades series of books out with Didsbury indie Confingo Publishing. Despite knackering my back by having a fall (I'm officially old as of last week), I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Beatification, which has been resurrected by the legendary John G Hall at Fuel in Withington. For all these various appearances, I've been trying to read different stuff, so as not to bore any recurring audience members, and this has worked out quite nicely (and even made me write afresh or adapt pieces) and has seen some very lovely comments, for which I am really pleased and indeed honoured and also rather humbled. It's been amazing to receive positive feedback on the new direction I've decided to take and stick with and keep chipping away at, and from people who themselves create great work using lots of different approaches and inspirations. I've also been delighted by a couple of recent emails accepting my applications to contribute to happenings in the new year – one is currently under wraps, but the first I can tell you about is appearing in the Manchester Open 2022 exhibition at HOME, with a visual poem that can be viewed as well as read. Here are the dates (all being well): preview weekend: Fri 21 Jan–Sun 23 Jan 2022; exhibition: Mon 24 Jan–Sun 27 Mar 2022. I've also had my story The Lookout nominated by the editors of Splonk ("the Irish for flash") for the Best Microfiction 2022 anthology, so fingers crossed for that, and more on the other project soon...