Writing for Site-Specific Theatre

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Jules Horne
Nicola Jo Cully and Pauline Goldsmith in 'Allotment' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Nicola Jo Cully and Pauline Goldsmith in ‘Allotment’, Edinburgh Fringe

I’d always wanted to collaborate on a site-specific piece, and when Nutshell’s director Kate Nelson asked me to write a play for her allotment for the Edinburgh Fringe, I jumped. Partly in excitement, partly in terror. Terror because we’d be devising with actors – so no more self-contained writer + laptop = script. Excitement because I knew I wanted to learn more about how theatre works, and get to grips with using exterior physicality, objects, time and space to tell a story.

Some exercises we did were familiar from creative writing. Take an object, improvise, judge nothing, see what unfolds. Except this time, the improvisation came from the actors, Joey and Mary. My role was to notice, note and learn. Their work with aprons and spades created differences in status, and several conflicting characters appeared – all wordless. We discussed what they meant to us. Themes started to emerge: family, rivalry, yearning, control.

Nutshell Allotment set at the Edinburgh Fringe

‘Allotment’ set, Edinburgh Fringe

Then we went to the bare, grey February allotment. Joey and Mary experimented with actions, perspective, height and inside/outside using the shed and surroundings. We took pictures that were lost but it didn’t matter. By the time it came to writing, I found I didn’t even need my notes. I had a store of ideas and images, and two characters had clearly distilled: sisters Dora and Maddy. Now they needed a story.

While writing for the outdoor space, I knew the actors would have to compete with traffic, distractions and weather for the audience’s attention. This suggested a bold, strong performance style, and the writing would need to serve that – so pace, rhythm, vowel sounds and the use of a narrative frame all came into play.

Dora and Maddy in Allotment, Edinburgh Fringe

Dora and Maddy in ‘Allotment’

Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf helped us to solve a tricky issue – how do the actors signal the start of the play and focus the audience without help from curtains and lights? Particularly when the show begins with them chatting to the audience, and they need to create a transition. Heaney brilliantly translates the opening Anglo-Saxon hwaet as ‘So.’ So with full-stop. The story-teller’s so. It’s beautifully clear and economical, and we stole it.

Joey and Mary had other commitments for August, so when it came to rehearsals, Pauline and Nicola joined us, and the allotment was planted up for the set. By July, it was lush green and full of bees and strawberries – a very different place. It struck me that a very different play would’ve appeared, if we’d started then.

The allotment holders came to the previews. More excitement, more terror. Playwriting is such a tightrope – you never know whether it really works until it goes in front of an audience. Thankfully, it did. Exeunt writer and director, job done. Enter Dora and Maddy, bearing bunches of mint. So.

ALLOTMENT has won a Scotsman Fringe First for new drama at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011, and was produced by Nutshell Theatre. Jules Horne teaches on A363 in Scotland. Her site is at www.juleshorne.com.

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Tutor’s novel in progress shortlisted for international prize

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Clare Spencer

A novel in progress by Lane Ashfeldt has been shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize 2011. There are six books on the shortlist and the winner is yet to be announced. Publication forms part of the prize for the winner.

Lane said “This has given me a teeny taste of what it must be like for those who have writing shortlisted for big literary awards, and it’s very scary indeed. Even if my novel is not selected as the overall winner, it is an honour to get this far.”

Meanwhile the shortlisting has inspired Lane to set aside some time this summer to prepare a final draft of the novel. She is hopeful that being shortlisted for the award could help bring her book to the attention of an agent or publisher.

A published writer of short fiction, Lane currently teaches Creative Writing (A215) in the London region.

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Emily Bullock wins Bristol Short Story Prize

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Clare Spencer
 OU creative Writing tutor Emily Bullock has won the hotly contested Bristol Short Story Prize for 2011 with a boxing-themed tale. 

 

Her story My Girl was judged best out of a record 2,100 entries from more than 30 countries, with writers from as far afield as New Zealand, Brazil, India, Canada, USA and South Africa submitting their work.

Emily, who is also doing a PhD in Creative Writing with the OU, wins £1,000 plus a £150 Waterstones gift card.  Her story will be published in Venue Magazine and Bristol Review of Books, as well as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 4.

‘My Girl is an evocative story, beautifully written, and with an internal rhythm that matches its setting, the boxing ring,’ said Bristol Prize Judge Tania Hershmann.  ‘This winning story “floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee,” as Muhammed Ali famously said.’

Emily says, ‘I feel privileged that my writing caught the attention of the judges.  As a writer, it is a great reward to know you have connected with readers.’

Emily is based in the OU’s London region, where she teaches A215 Creative Writing.

Emily’s personal website.

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Northwords Now – Summer Issue 2011

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Chris Powici

Just visit our website and you’ll get some idea of how chuffed I feel right now, not just with the quality of writing in the summer issue but also with the terrific artwork. You can also get to hear – via our podcasts – poetry in Gaelic (various young poets), Shetlandic (Christie Williamson) and the haunting, American-accented English of JL Williams. If all this sounds like an enormous, brazen plug by an editor, it is, but it’s heartfelt and true!

www.northwordsnow.co.uk

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Triplet: Michael W. Thomas

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Clare Spencer

My writing and publication record defines me principally as a fiction-writer and poet.  In the last couple of years, however, I have become increasingly interested in writing drama.  In the context of the OU, this may well have been through my exposure to dramatic techniques as a tutor on A363.  More generally, however, I felt the need to try and get at the essence of what characters were saying—or trying to avoid saying.  As a result, I wanted to set aside the often tyrannous ballyhoo of the fiction narrator, he or she who must be supplied with descriptive fodder: Thoughtfully, he turned from the window . . . no, no,  Lost in thought, he turned from the window . . . ok, how about Turning from the window, he . . . morphed into a hatrack?  Well, that’d bring all the realists up short . . . but I wanted to take a break from the demands of narrated fiction—and, come to that, the often hazier demands of poetry.

          What characters say can be very interesting.  What they don’t want to say, even more so.  We live our lives surrounded by those who withhold, prevaricate, cover ignorance with bluster—think about the last time you tried to check your bank details over the phone.   So it was that I wrote a short play, FAQ, about the eternal, Manichean clash between motorist and car-park attendant, entirely in questions.  If statements or explanations keep open the lungs of dialogue, questions—especially when met with further questions—close them down.  After that, my interest expanded to a situation where, rather than blocking each other with questions, characters would talk up a storm—but in order to veil a secret they’ve never discussed and have no wish to now.  From this came another short play, When?  An older couple are about to take their third and youngest child to university.  Another milestone—not least in terms of offering them the latest opportunity to talk to her about something from the past, something delicate and painful that involves her.  Will they let the opportunity pass yet again?  Will they seize the opportunity?  Or has happenstance devised a way of making them face it?  We never learn what the secret is.  My main interest was in watching the couple . . . well, dealing with not dealing with it.

       Through a play reading session for Script (now defunct, sadly), my work got the attention of Margaret Jackman, director and actress (The Royal, Holby City, Candy Cabs), who also writes as Margaret Manuell.  Through her good offices, an evening of three plays was devised: FAQ, When and Service, one of her own plays, set in a nursing home and similarly focused on how people swerve away from truths.  Triplet, the evening was called, and it was staged in Staffordshire and at the Blue Orange Theatre, Birmingham, in May 2011.  The cast, including Margaret herself, Alison Belbin (often in The Archers) and Philip Jennings created the kind of magic that you hope for with scripts.  They lifted the words off the page and took them into that other world, the dramatic world of action, gesture, inflection—and fear of secrets. 

          Other productions of Triplet are being planned for later in the year.  In the meantime, I’m back dishing up words for a greedy narrator (in the sequel to my 2009 novel, The Mercury Annual) and also, slowly, putting together a new poetry collection.  I’d like to think that these projects have gained an extra edge, fresh vitality, from my excursions into script-writing.  Even as I write this, I hear Mick from Pinter’s The Caretaker, saying ‘Now then, son, don’t get perky, don’t get perky.’  But I hope it’s true.

Michael W. Thomas, The Mercury Annual (Birmingham: Silver Age, 2009); Port Winston Mulberry (poems) (Cheshire: Littlejohn and Bray, 2010)

www.michaelwthomas.co.uk

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How teaching Creative Writing with the OU has influenced my own writing practice – by Shanta Everington

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Clare Spencer

When I started teaching Creative Writing with The Open University in London in 2008, I had two recently published novels under my belt – Marilyn and Me (Cinnamon Press, 2007) and Give Me a Sign (Flame Books, 2008) – and an MA Creative Writing with Distinction (Novel Writing Route, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2006). I’m sure my published novels helped me to get the job and they certainly gave me some kudos with my students. 

The thing was, the taught forms on the A215 module I was appointed to teach were short stories, poetry and life writing, and aside from a single poem and several journalistic real life articles, I hadn’t actually been published in these forms. So I decided that in the first year of teaching, I may as well undertake the same activities as the students, with the aim of submitting my own pieces when we got to the final part of the course, ‘Going Public’, which requires the students to research potential markets for their writing and present a piece to professional standards aimed at a named magazine.  In fact, I found out about several short story and poetry magazines that I hadn’t previously heard of through my students sharing their research for the final assignment!  

As my students submitted their final assignments to me in the summer of 2009, so I sent my freshly crafted short stories and poems out to the world. My first published short story, ‘Talking in Tongues’, was included in First Edition magazine (which published a fair few OU students but subsequently appears to have gone out of print) in autumn 2009. There followed two stories accepted for anthologies via competitions – ‘Yasmina’s Elbow’ (Even More Tonto Short Stories, Tonto Books, 2010) and ‘Graft’ (Mosaic, Bridge House Publishing, 2010) – and a smattering of small press published poems (including Envoi  poetry journal, Seeking Refuge anthology and Women Writers: A zine). We could debate the relative merits of open submissions versus competitions, but I am personally quite a fan of competitions, not least because my debut novel found a publisher after being shortlisted for (but not winning, I might add) the Cinnamon Press First Novel Award. And I count my first short story ‘success’ as ‘Hang Up’, which was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2009. Alas, it did not make the winning entries selected for the anthology but still boosted my morale!  It finally found a home with Unthank Books and will be included in their collection, Unthology to be published later this year. 

So there we have it – A215 does exactly what it says on the tin! Teaching this module has certainly fed into my own writing practice and encouraged me to experiment with and seek publication in a range of forms. There are undoubtedly less markets for creative life writing than poetry and fiction, and for now, I’ve decided to keep the non-fiction side of my writing market-led, publishing various articles and two parenting books,Terrible Twos: A Parent’s Guide and Baby’s First Year: A Parent’s Guide (Need2Know Books, 2010 and 1011). I did include some diary extracts in the books though, so the life writing managed to sneak its way in there somehow! Now I just need to get back on track with my next novel… 

To find out more about Shanta’s writing and teaching, visit her website at www.shantaeverington.co.uk

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My Other Blog: Chris Powici

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Chris Powici
I seem to have gone blog-crazy and started another one.

Mountain bike, minus poet, somewhere near Sheriffmuir

Maybe mildly blog-bitten would be a better description. Anyway, if you’re interested, my other blog can be found at poetonabike.blogspot.com.  Strangely enough it’s about poetry and cycling, though I find it hard to believe there aren’t poets who don’t also cycle. Apparently Keats wouldn’t go anywhere unless by titanium-framed hardtail mountain bike.

 
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update from Chris Powici

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Clare Spencer

May was a strange, busy and enjoyable month. The strange side has largely consisted of weird fluctuations between summer and something resembling winter. Big winds have toppled a lot of trees hereabouts which gives the landscape a sort of dishevelled but interesting look – as if the weather has just finished having a party. Maybe that should be rave.

On the literary front, the highlight has to have been the Ullapool Book Festival where I read some of my poems at a free Sunday morning event. Not a bad audience and not a bad reading (though I say it myself) considering any sleep the night before was sacrificed to neuralgia following a tooth extraction. We poets are such a heroic bunch. The festival itself was as convivial and stimulating as ever – smaller, inclusive and much friendlier than many of these gatherings but with no sacrifice in quality. The president, James Robertson, was in tremendous form as host and all round enthusiastic presence. There was even an OU sponsored event in the shape of Peter Mackay’s talk on Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. Other highlights included poetry from Don Paterson, a nigh perfect demonstration of the short story from Bernard MacLaverty, and two sessions featuring Canadian journalist and novelist Linden MacIntyre . The atmosphere was given a further boost after the Scottish Parliament election results and the news that Ullapool resident, festival supporter and owner of the Ceilidh Place (hotel, restaurant, bar and art gallery) had a won list seat for the SNP. The malts in the Ceilidh Place bar seemed to taste even finer thanks to the celebratory mood. They also helped with the neuralgia.

As for Northwords Now, the summer issue is 90% ready with lots of fine writing, especially form Orkney and Shetland. You’ll have to wait until late July to see the results but I can let people in on one of the more enjoyable aspects of editing: choosing the artwork. For the next issue Shetlanders Paul Bloomer (painter) and Ivan Hawick (photographer) will be featured. I’m not going to give the game away by saying which images we’ll be using but you’ll not be disappointed if you spare a few minutes googling their work on the web.

http://www.northwordsnow.co.uk/

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All-Action Radio Road Movie

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Jules Horne

Scott Hoatson as Kirkpatrick MacMillan and Lee McPhail on spot FX

The story of Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the inventor of the pedal cycle, is well known in Dumfriesshire, but he doesn’t seem to get due credit elsewhere. Time, I thought, to put the record straight, and give him his own radio play.  The trouble was, the deeper I dug into the facts, the more the tale imploded. Romantic retellings have fudged the truth, and bike historians are at each others’ throats over who really invented the velocipede.

Luckily, the Radio 4 commissioners said ‘no biopics’. I read that as ‘artistic licence hereby granted’. Which was just as well, as it turned out…

Isabella Jarrett and Gavin Mitchell as the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch

The story bones: Kirkpatrick’s invention, his journey to Glasgow, public humiliation and retreat to his village. Immediately, a few structural factors were apparent: he needed someone to talk to on the journey. I didn’t want him talking to himself, as that would make him too (a) mad or (b) solipsistic. It wouldn’t create much scope for action or narrative drive. So we gave him the Machine – the mechanical voice of the velocipede. The Machine has an evolutionary drive that pushes him on, and saves his life in the end. That’s the first joy of radio – that talking bikes are perfectly normal.

The second joy is the actors. We could only afford six, and this was a journey of encounters, so everyone brilliantly played four or five characters. Radio doubling is much trickier than on stage, as you don’t have visual cues. At one point I was concerned I had too many people, and plotted them on an Excel spreadsheet. Any characters not earning their keep were summarily dispatched, reassigned, or amalgamated. It’s harsh out there.

At one point I fancied a Hitchcockian cameo and took part in a crowd scene in the studio. This brought home a massive lesson about radio: if you can’t hear it, it isn’t there. There’s no point in nodding, shaking your fist, or even pointing a gun. Everything has to be vocalised. That includes reactions to unfolding events – so if you don’t have a line, you may need non-lexical sounds – grunts, laughter, uh-huh – which aren’t in the script. But microphones are incredibly intimidating and unforgiving. Every grunt is horribly magnified and feels just wrong. The cameo came out silent. But I was there – honest! And with a new appreciation of how difficult radio acting is.

Finally, radio joy three: action sequences. In my view, radio wins out over film every time. You can send a blacksmith hurtling down a hill cheaply, effectively and without putting the actor in mortal danger. I wanted to hear the exhilarating moment when the world’s very first cyclist bombs down a hill without any brakes. Here’s Scott Hoatson as Macmillan doing just that, urged on by John Kazek as the Machine:

Kirkpatrick Macmillan 20 second audio clip

Macmillan’s Marvellous Motion Machine by Jules Horne was directed by Rosie Kellagher for Catherine Bailey Limited and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2011. Jules teaches on A363 in Scotland.

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Writing in the sand

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Clare Spencer
 
The Burning Path by Kevan Manwaring
 
Three strangers meet in a nameless desert and must come to terms with their past before they can escape it: a First World War airman; an American aviatrix of the Thirties; and a French poet of the skies from the Second World War. They are the lost of history and must go into the desert to find themselves. To find peace they must walk the burning path. Each is forced to confront the question: What are you prepared to sacrifice for the one you love?
 
Fiction, £9.99 ISBN 978-1-906900-19-9

 

Notes on The Burning Path and El Gouna residency 

During my time as Writer-in-Residence at El Gouna I have been working on my desert-based novel, The Burning Path – part of my 5-book cross-genre series, The Windsmith Elegy, which I began in 2002. I wrote the first draft in of this, the fourth volume, in 2008 and here expanded and edited it into a second. I worked on a chapter a day (there’s 23 in total), writing an extra 20,000 words (along with 7 new poems – to date – and this blog). To live in a desert country while working on this has made all the difference – those grains of sand have become grit in the oyster. It has been an intense and sometimes challenging experience – ideal for my novel. It has enabled me to be completely in the ‘zone’, inhabiting a similar space (physical/mental/emotional) to my characters.  I find this form of ‘method writing’ most effective, although it might not make me easy to be around. Finding myself staying in an artificial and often stifling cocoon (enforced socialising & unnecessary opulence; when I yearned for solitude & minimalism) I have forged a ‘desert environment’ through an experiment in estrangement – an intentional distancing of myself from those I ‘should’ connect with, to feel ‘other’, to experience the perspective of the outsider, like the boy in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. I strived to keep the doors of perception fully open (as William Blake declared: ‘When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite,’). Antoine de St Exupery in Wind, Sand and Stars talks of stratascopos, the bird’s eye view he experienced as a pioneering pilot. Only through an intentional disjuncture was this possible (an extreme method for a land of extremes) – life at the edge of the circle, for the littoral is always a creatively fertile place, like the banks of the Nile here in Egypt: a country divided in the Red and Black Lands (as their flag symbolises) – the red is the ‘barren’ desert (which protects and offers hidden treasures); the black, the fertile soil of the Nile Valley. Life is like this – good and bad mixed together, the bitter and the sweet, light and shadow. Contrast is healthy, essential. In Italian painting its called chiaroscuro. If my time here had been absolutely perfect I wouldn’t have found the necessary edge for my writing. No pain, no gain. And so everything that has happened to me here has been just right. It has enabled me to walk the Burning Path and bring my novel alive. I have worn the mark of Cain and been cast out into the wilderness. Yet despite being in a social desert there have been occasional oases and these have kept me sane and made my stay here far more enjoyable – to all the wonderful people I have met (Egyptians, Gounies, tourists) thank you.

I set off from England with a quote from Helen Keller in the back of my mind: ‘No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.’

I feel my ‘optimism’ has paid off – travel allows for creative possibilities, pushes us out of our comfort zone, expand our world-view, and makes us embrace the other – and find we are brothers. As I wrote in the sample chapter I read out at the final event: The desert is the last place you expect to encounter the kindness of strangers but it is the place where you need  it the most. The more isolated we become, the more hostile the environment, the more we need each other.

To write a book about strangers meeting in the desert in a place where … strangers meet in the desert couldn’t have been more perfect. El Gouna is a wonderful international zone where the kindness of strangers can be encountered daily:

Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt (10:19)

Email to Anthony (fellow writer/creative writing teacher): Anyway, it’s been a really productive time – just got to the end of the 2nd Draft of The Burning Path, and I can’t wait for people to read it. I think its my best yet – but you have to believe that, don’t you! The style is alot more stripped back. I wrote it the year my Dad died and maybe the austere aesthetic reflects that, but there’s is real beauty in the desert vistas and cultures, as I’ve discovered. Ultimately it’s an affirmation of the desert, its ecology and ethos, its abundant ‘nothingness’ – the opposite of Western consumer culture! It cries out Less is More.

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