Launch of Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz

 Sheila Chapman writes:

Flux Gallery is an enticing place: its walls are not parallel and they fly away from you at the front door into an expanded space laid out and lit by Julie with her artistic eye, and decorated with Dan’s excellent photographic art work. With wine, nibbles, sandwiches and great music from Des the Miner what more could you ask for, except the launch of a poetry collection, Sky Burial, by Genny Rahtz.

Genny was featured in the renowned A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull  which was published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd in 1982 and which featured a foreword by Phillip Larkin. She was supported last night by three of the other poets whose work appeared in the book and as T.F.Griffin explained in his introduction, they spent those years in Hull under the tutelage of Douglas Dunn and in the shade of Philip Larkin.

Ian Gregson’s poems included surprising juxtapositions of ideas and images as he invited us to consider a corpse and a parrot in the same room, and the The Paper Bag as the self which, as it falls from your grasp  'grazes its lips on the empty pavement,....mimes its unheard words’

Cartoonist influences were captured in poems such as Queen Victoria as an Owl ‘because she did actually look like one’ and The Elastic Band, where the English Empire is ‘snagged on peaks’ and ‘... snapped back in our faces’. Other poems considered the isolation of the individual (Traffic Island Desert) and Thomas the Tank Engine as a Cyborg at puberty. Ian continued the cyborg theme in The Breast  where Jordan’s breasts are cyborgs who are  trying for a new start away from her and ‘...have secretly acquired an agent’

Douglas Huston  treated us to a sometimes humorous and always interesting selection of poems, some in rhyme and some in free verse. In School Report an ageing school boy reflects on the past where a teacher was encased in his ‘black gown’s folded wings’ and indulged in ‘weapons grade rages’ and in Lines on Man’s dereliction ‘disintegration is where the big time starts’. Other poems included Report from up the Lane, The Quick One, Once Upon a Time (‘beyond mortgages’) and the Weather Regrets.  A poem, Poet Laureate Ritual Bath Murder, which is a skit on Ted Hughes poetic style and lifestyle, was received with great gusto by the audience especially when, after the murder, the poet ‘...went off to do things with your wife’.

Genny Rahtz told us that since childhood she has been greatly  influenced by American writers and by books about them. It also became apparent through her reading that she is influenced by cultural rituals such as sky burials. These burials take place where there is little or no wood to burn a body and the ground is undiggable so graves are not an option. The bodies are dismembered and offered up for buzzards to feed on and in the title poem of her collection she imagines her own sky burial where her brain

 ‘... is scooped out / and folded with ceremony / into my crushed skull’

... ‘as a feast for vultures, / kites, ravens.’

Genny also treated us to three animal poems: Rat Catcher, ‘I am my own rat catcher. / I let the beast go ... I allocate whole days to him’; Lambing, ‘You watch the sun rising as you walk home .. and fear that crows will come for the eyes of new born lambs.’; Desert Lion. ‘could you have known ... one day, Tate and Lyle / would embalm your story / on their syrup tin?’ She also read, in her simple and unassuming style, other poems from the collection including: Soft Fruit Harvest,  ‘the sound of canes rubbing / as I pull and let them go, ... I think of elephants / stripping leaves from acacia trees’; Self Portrait,  ‘I thought my true colours / required paint / and heavy paper’;

Before reading Geometry, Genny explained that there is scientific proof that  our ability to navigate and judge spaces is hard wired into our heads; the  poem starts with children  in US cities who ‘... learn asymmetry of 3D grids, / kaleidoscopic patterns / of concrete, metal/ glass’ and moves on to an isolated Amazonian tribe who know ‘... from childhood how timber falls / how shapes and angles / work in practice. They read / the time language of shadows’.

Genny spoke of her mother, who died thirty years before her father and who, because of that, was rather overshadowed in the present activity and memory family life. In  the poem My Mother Wendy – she says ‘I should light a candle / before it gets too dark’

Finally she paid  homage to her beloved  American painters and writers in Sky Windows celebrating  ‘the long grain / of Wyoming voices in Annie Proulx, / the laconic / slow transatlantic roll / of Black Mountain poets.’

Sky Burial by Genny Rahtz (Flux Gallery Press 2010)

An absolute delight

Sally Bavage writes:

35 Years of Loitering by Ray Brown was an absolute delight – a tour of a creative life in interviewing and writing plays for mainstream theatre, articles for magazines, radio scripts… the list was extensive, the many snippets both amusing and thought-provoking.

Ray was born and brought up on the edge of Thorner and although he has lived locally for most of his life he still feels like the ‘boy on the edge of the village’ wearing the ‘cloak of alienation.’  He has the quirky perspective of someone who can observe the ordinary and discern the extraordinary. Who else would be radicalised by the accounts department of Butlins?  Or move from an apprenticeship at Heathrow to an early academic career in Psychology? 

Kurt Vonnegut “wrote fiction in order to tell the truth” and this philosophy has informed Ray throughout his long professional life.  From first writing about an early (and unsuccessful) attempt to seduce his eighteen year-old naïve but “pretty” self (his own choice of adjective) – possibly by Quentin Crisp on later reflection – he found his voice for both the serious and the comic. The miners’ strike of the 70s was a significant benchmark in his perspective, as was the later civil war in the place once known as Yugoslavia, which he observed at first hand from many trips to a region he continues to love and visit.

He made his first visit to the region in 1985 and soon fell in love with the country and its people. He has returned once or twice a year ever since. In his play ...is normal! which was at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2003, he worked with two actors to present a funny, moving and compelling mixture of fact, fiction, performance and dramatic readings which also featured music and voices recorded live in former Yugoslavia. “The title is a quote,” he told us. “It’s what everybody said in response to questions about the war and its horrors.”

In an early part of his career, writing for the groves of academe – including ghost writing a textbook he was later asked to peer review - he also taught locally, wrote pub guides, articles for magazines and scripts for successful plays performed nationwide.  A spell of creative writing residencies in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, British Rail workshops included a poignant one in a local hospice.  He clearly painted for us a picture in words of the black humour of chemotherapy patients who raised hairless eyebrows at revelations in the writers’ circle or else raised their hair (wigs) to reveal, in another way, their life history.

Radio scripts have formed a significant part of his life for decades and he treated the audience to some excerpts from shows on topics as diverse as flight and … duffle coats. Music became a key medium in his delivery of the message, and a delightful conflation of the jazz trumpet of Humphey Lyttelton with the sound of the machine attaching toggles to the likes of the 555TM duffle as worn by Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea was masterful.  Who amongst us did not call up an abiding memory of duffledom?

He spoke movingly about writing Living Pretty, the life story of Alfred Williams, who was his neighbour when he lived in Kirkstall in 1981. It is based on the autobiography which he co-wrote, To Live It Is To Know It, which moves from a childhood in Jamaica to retirement in Leeds. It tells of an ordinary man made extraordinary by resilience, intelligence and good humour. Alfred spoke in a blend of Jamaican patois and other dialects, but Ray was able to represent his speech with great authenticity, because dialect and the way people speak is one of his obvious fortes. Alfred Williams once cultivated a plot on Burley Model Allotments, and there was once (and still is) a plan to put it on outside the allotments hut.

His politics have always informed his work, although an over- bold use of a clip of the voice coach of Margaret Thatcher when prime minister persistently being told to lower her voice led to a period in radio wilderness. Not that this changed his perspective: his commitment always to use the interview and music links to “tell the truth” remains undimmed.  Ray has, and continues, to shine a light on life from his position “on the edge of the village”.

Valediction for John Jones

Richard Wilcocks writes:

John Jones died in December aged eighty-four. He was a long-term resident of Headingley and a strong supporter of the LitFest from the moment it started. His interests and areas of expertise were many and various: he lectured for many years in the Fine Art department at Leeds University, where he was in overall charge of studio instruction and where he created and ran a course in the history of film, an artist who thought deeply about life drawing and a brilliant conversationalist.

He was very knowledgeable about literature in general, and was especially interested in the works of James Joyce. He had an impressive collection of Joyce’s work, and exhibited a series of his own illustrations to Ulysses.

He collected Victorian optical toys and magic lantern slides, and was the founder of the International Magic Lantern Society. Last autumn I was suggesting to him that one of his magic lantern shows, on the damage done by the demon drink, could be performed as part of this year’s LitFest. I am sure it would have been greatly appreciated.

In 2009 he took part in what has become an annual short story evening in Café Lento: his contribution was part of his autobiography, which he had recorded on a number of audiotape cassettes shortly before he suffered a stroke. He spoke about the year in the States in 1965 during which he interviewed artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono. His interesting account of Yoko Ono’s stay with him (with her then partner and her daughter) in Rochester Terrace, and of the happening which she organised at Leeds College of Art in which she was tied up in a large black bag, was written up in local newspapers in 2009, then picked up by media around the world.

A year ago, for the third Headingley LitFest, he contributed with Gaby Jones to one of the first house events, in his front room in Hollin Lane. Gaby and John are pictured below at this event, which was called Déja-Vu. Gaby spoke of her return to the villa by Lake Como which she had known as a small child, and John spoke (again, on tape) about when he was a young soldier in 1945, who had been conscripted into the Royal Engineers and sent to recently-liberated Ostend in Belgium.

His obituary, written by one of his devoted ex-students, the cartoonist Steve Bell, can be found in the Guardian online.

So, farewell to an old friend.

 

Launched

Sheila Chapman writes:

The LitFest launch happened in HEART last night in the Shire Oak Room, a ‘large spacious and bright space’ (Bill Fitzsimons) which had been thoughtfully set out by the HEART volunteers and staff. The room was filled with people who sat at round tables clutching their drinks, raffle tickets and a ‘golden ticket’ entry into the free book draw for one of the twenty-four copies of Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People's. As Richard Wilcocks explained, the LitFest had received these books courtesy of World Book Day. He also read out his valediction for John Jones, which will appear on this blog separately.

So, we were off to a good start and James Nash, our compère for the evening, explained to us that the literary quiz on the tables was to be completed as a team effort by each table and the results announced at the end of the break – more of this later.

We settled down then to hear the Word Birds, a group of female poets - Sue Vickerman, Jean Harrison and Sue Butler - who were accompanied by a male musician, Robin Fishwick.

Robin started us off with a Song for Headingley and after songs about Croatia, Croatian Wedding Song, and Hungary, he finished with Green Man, a song inspired by standing at the pedestrian crossing outside Mike’s Carpets in Armley. He played a timple (have I got the name right Robin?) and also a tenor recorder through which he hummed at the same time as playing. This produced a very different sound which, as Ruth Wynne said, ‘was adventurous, interesting and original’.

Sue Vickerman’s  first poems reflected her time in China: she mused on the fragility of the skyscrapers which have grown up during current economic boom – something which has particular resonance given the devastation of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She then treated us to a series of poems drawn from her experience as a life model which she thinks allows her time to muse and compose poems and ‘hang out with artists’.  She spoke of the continuing rounding and softening of a woman’s body charted by an artist as he draws her through her developing pregnancy, and ‘the nicotine finger ‘of the drawing instructor as he gets intimately close to demonstrate the lines and angle of her body and her ‘pelt rises’ . This Bird weighs her words carefully and builds her evocative  images to entrance and enlighten her audience.

James Nash rounded off this first half with a humorous and well observed poem about his experience as a gooseberry in The Lounge cinema. He had gone there with two friends, who were a couple, obviously, and their casual intimacy, when one of them stroked the other’s leg, set him off on a desperate search for a leg of his own to stroke.

The audience worked hard during the break to complete the quiz. There was a great deal of muttering, sly glancing over shoulders and desperate argument and counter argument. Was A Touch of Frost filmed in Leeds , or was it Banks? I don’t know! The results were announced. Had anyone got the maximum twenty-two?. No. Twenty-one? No. Twenty? No. ... sixteen? Yes! A draw! Two tables were entitled to the prize - drinks for the whole table. But were there enough drinks to go round? Yes, phew, what a quiz.

There was more of the Word Birds for the second half. Jean Harrison described her place poems as ‘not romantic’ and yet there was romance in her description of a Zen garden where there were bushes with ‘meditative shoulders’ and in the ice-cream chimes which made a fragment of Greensleeves run through her head for days. Sue Butler who has lived all over the world, spoke of the hardships of Russia in 1937, of joyriding in someone else’s glasses and of using poetry as a weapon, particularly against her rich and handsome brother. Sue Vickerman spoke of her return to Bradford and the tree outside her new Bradford flat ‘which will never dapple anything’ and of her days as a student in Headingley when she was a ‘rock dove’ The evening was rounded off by more music from Robin and by a very welcome sonnet of love from James Nash.

The audience set off home clutching raffle prizes, books and drinks. As one of them said ’Thanks for a lovely evening! Nice blend of words and music!’ (Sue LS6)

The evening was filmed by two students from Leeds Metropolitan University (Joe and Matt) who also conducted interviews with performers and some members of the audience.

Below - two of the Word Birds - Sue Vickerman and Jean Harrison

How to get published

Sally Bavage writes:
How to get published was the theme for tonight’s session of the fourth Headingley Litfest, held in the Claremont room at the brand new Heart Community Centre on Bennett Road.  More than forty people crammed in to a packed and lively session to hear Isabel Losada give some wannabe authors very practical advice about getting their literary baby into the welcoming arms of an agent or publishing house. 

Realism not idealism is the key, she insists.  “You must believe passionately in your book and persevere to find the right agent or publisher who likes your work.” 

George Orwell claimed that the secret of being published was ‘brevity, clarity, precision’ – something Isabel emphasised through many pragmatic examples.  There are some tough questions to ask yourself first so that you can be very clear with any would-be agent:

Who is the book really for?
What section of the bookshop would you find it in?
Does it engage the attention of the reader from the first paragraph?
What is the unique selling point of this book?
What books are similar? (so you can describe it)
How would you sell it? (produce a marketing plan)

Isabel has published six books; her latest The Battersea Park Road to Paradise will be out in paperback in May 2011. You must be a self-critical editor who has the courage of their convictions and ignores the (wildly differing) opinions of friends who would each ask you to change something different.  You also need resilience to bounce back from the inevitable rejection letters and the confidence to just keep going. 

And you won’t make your fortune, unless your initials are J K.  Sadly, ninety percent of authors earn less than working on a checkout till, and the average advance of less than three thousand pounds is hardly the step to financial heaven – although J K Rowling was told in one rejection letter that “You’ll never make any money writing children’s books.” 

Isabel herself got quite a few rejection slips for books.  “We’re too mainline for you” and “Covers too many different subject areas” or “Put it on the shelf and put it down to experience” were some; the comments were conflicting and could have been demoralising unless you have the iron determination to just keep going.  She has and she did – her books have now sold one hundred thousand copies in sixteen languages.

Isabel has worked as an actress, singer, dancer, researcher, TV producer, broadcaster, public speaker, comedian as well as staying committed to her writing.   She brought a number of these skills to a lively session, trying to sell us a broom (“handcrafted bristles, lovingly grouped, woven together for months” – you get the idea) and singing a line from a Madonna number.  As one feedback quote said, “Informative, fun and inspiring! 

If you are interested in her books that focus on the pursuit of happiness through the development of human potential through the media of nuns, men and the Dalai Llama, to name but a few, then take a look here.

Close up at Café Lento

Sally Bavage writes:

The second event of the fourth Headingley Litfest – A Sense of Self - was held at Café Lento on North Lane.  A well-mixed crowd ranging in age from the teens to the seventies were treated to half a dozen tales.  True or false: you decide.  Autobiography or whimsy? Lost youth - in the tale from one ex-social worker - or lost youth from presenters remembering their glory days?

Café Lento was packed with close to 30 local residents happy to listen to the background jazz (a foretaste of the Music Festival in Headingley from 13 to 19 June this year) and drink in the stories as well as the coffee.  A warm atmosphere as old friends greeted each other and new ones struck up conversations with their neighbours who were, well, close up.

Was a Facebook search for a first, lost love the reminiscences of a man reflecting on the path his romantic life had taken, or the story woven by a talented raconteur and wordsmith?  (Proprietor Richard Lindley)

Did the Revolution (of about  three decades ago) come to a small Pennine town, welcomed in by flyposters who ‘drove their chevy to the levee’ (actually a Morris Minor with a faulty tail light) on the way to the local factory?  (Moira Garland)

Was Pete Townsend really second choice for The Who, supplanting the first choice from the Isle of Man whose drummer friend told the tale?  And what a tale – of stagefright, flying drumsticks and a brief stage appearance with the renowned bandleader Ivy Benson.  (Doug Sandle)

Not a daffodil but a bog asphodel made an appearance, giving us commentary on the booted walkers passing by.  (Mary Mayall)

No boots on the next walkers, just trainers needing repair and a cuppa in a twee teashop on Haworth Main Street as cold rain sheeted down and the lives of the Brontës in the Parsonage Museum prompted debate.  (Lis Bertolla)

Finally, a tale of evacuation – no, not from a war but from a horse called Oliver on a mission to contribute something less than mysterious - and steaming - to a Leeds city centre reading of the banns announcing a production of the Chester Mystery Plays. (Richard Wilcocks)

A mixed bag indeed, and gently enjoyable for the range and scope of the stories.  How much was invention, how much recollection – will we ever know?

Oscar Wilde adds:

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. 

Below, Doug Sandle reads:

Gujerat met Sicily

Salvo’s Salumeria is intimate and full of atmosphere – more so yesterday evening, when Hansa came. It was, of course, the first event of the LitFest.....let’s hope they all go as well as this one.

Gip Dammone  introduced Hansa Dabhi, who is quite a storyteller as well as a great authority on cooking and the Hindu Philosophy of Food and Lifestyle: she spoke about her exit from Uganda, just before the dictator Idi Amin got into his stride, and about how she took the first steps towards setting up the now-renowned all-female vegetarian Gujerati restaurant down in the middle of the city, which many of her audience, I suspect, have visited.

We were looking at the starters which had been delivered to our tables as she described them in detail and gave their names and ingredients in both English and Gujerati – Bateta Vada, Pau Bhaji and Patudi. You’ll find the recipes in her second cookbook. She went on to talk about how expensive the medical services were back in Uganda – the Western sort that is. Her family always had the spice box at hand for cuts and colds: a sore throat, for example, could be cured by adding a teaspoon of Cumin seeds (Jeera) and small pieces of dry ginger to a glass of boiling water. After it has cooled down and been strained, it should be taken twice daily.

Sicilian-style pasta with aubergine and tomato was the main course from Gip Dammone. This was followed by a dessert which Hansa said was easy to make. She demonstrated the truth of this in front of us. It was Fruit Shrikhand – her version of a popular Gujarati yoghurt curd dessert with tropical fruit, garnished with cardamom.

There was more on the use of the spice box for the treatment of everyday ailments (from husband Kish) and plenty of copies of the second cookbook (Hansa’s, more than just a restaurant....It’s my life!) to be signed and sold.

Gip Dammone looks rather like Dizzy Gillespie, and he indulged us by playing recordings of sessions by the great jazz trumpeter, along with performances by Louis Jordan dating from the late forties. A man of taste!

Rommi Smith at Heart - evening of 26 March

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Poetry and Jazz is something which brings back memories of the sixties, which immediately dates me, of course. How well I remember my late teenage haunt, the old Peanuts Club, upstairs at the Kings Arms behind Liverpool Street station, where the likes of Mike Westbrook and Mike Osborne played and the likes of Bill Butler, Jeff Nuttall, Mike Horovitz and even myself blasted forth. Blending poetry and music (Coltrane-related Jazz a lot of the time) was a big scene in the sixties - I remember watching Danny Abse doing it with aplomb, and everyone knew that over in the States it happened in every smoky café. But enough of the nostalgia....

It's still going strong, and one of its most stunning practitioners in these parts is Rommi Smith, but to be accurate, we can't just say poetry and jazz in her case. She is a brilliant poet, musician and playwright whose work fuses spoken word and music. She has been performing since the age of fourteen and has achieved a reputation for sharp, socially conscious poetic imagery coupled with astute harmonies and jazz, funk and soul rhythms.

She has done so much that it is difficult to do her justice in a few paragraphs. My most recent view of her (through a camera lens) was in Leeds Civic Hall at the awards ceremony last October for the 2010 Leeds Peace Poetry Competition. For the second year running, she was the chief judge. After insightful and sympathetic comments, she called each winner in the primary and secondary school categories individually from the audience, and each one stepped forward bravely to read. Applause swelled, cameras flashed, smiles spread. If only all teachers (and judges) were like that...

Rommi performs her work regularly, both nationally and internationally at arts, music and literature festivals.  Rommi’s work has been broadcast on various media, including the BBC - print and audio versions of Rommi’s work are featured on the BBC website. Google her now!

During the bicentenary celebrations for the abolition of the slave trade, she was Poet in Residence at the Houses of Parliament, and she is currently in residence at John Keats's house in London. Use the link on the right to read more about her - there's plenty.

And if you haven't done so already,  get your ticket for the evening of  Saturday, 26 March, when she performs with the excellent Fruit Tree Project in the Shire Oak Room at Heart in Bennett Road. It is going to be something which will be remembered for a long time, so make sure you are there!

The Girl in the Polkadot Dress

Richard Wilcocks writes:

When Beryl Bainbridge (who sadly died last July) spoke in the New Headingley Club in 2009 (second Headingley LitFest, click on the link on your right), she read from her novel in progress The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. She dwelled at length on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, 1968, a key part of the plot. He had just won the California primary election for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and investigators later tried to identify a mysterious young woman seen in the hotel pantry, wearing a polka dot dress. In the book, her name is Rose.

This is now just about published, to be released at the beginning of June this year close to the anniversary of the shooting by Sirhan Sirhan. It can be ordered from Radish Books in advance if you want to be the first on your street to have read it. Reference is ISBN-13: 978-0316728485

Strangely, the official blurb does not mention the assassination. It reads as follows:

In the rainswept summer of 1968, Rose sets off for the United States from Kentish Town to meet a man she knows as Washington Harold, in her suitcase a polka-dot dress and a one-way ticket. In a country rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King and a rising groundswell of violence, they are to join forces in search of the charismatic and elusive Dr Wheeler - oracle, guru and redeemer - whom Rose credits with rescuing her from a terrible childhood, and against whom Harold nurses a silent grudge. As they trail their quarry, zigzagging through America in a camper van, the odd couple - Rose, damaged child of grey postwar Britain, and nervous, obsessive, driven Harold - encounter a ragged counter-cultural army of Wheeler's acolytes, eddying among dangerous currents of obscure dissent and rage. But somewhere in the wide American darkness, Dr Wheeler is waiting.

 

Thanks, Radish

Headingley has still got a library, but no real bookshop since Bookz closed down a few years ago (no offence, Oxfam Books...) so it is wonderful to be attended upon by the excellent Radish bookshop, which is situated far from the delights of God's Own Suburb in the alternative universe of Chapel Allerton. The Alan Bennett freebies which we were given by the World Book people arrived there, along with several cardboard boxes containing other titles. Apparently, Nigel Slater's Toast is popular in those parts.

Prominently displayed near the checkout desk this afternoon was The Battersea Park Road To Enlightenment, by Isabel Losada, who will be speaking/performing at the Headingley Heart Centre on Wednesday 16 March on How to get published, and who intends to sign copies of her best-seller not only at the event but also the following morning at Radish.

Remember Bookz? It was piled high with cheapo and remaindered tomes, but there was also plenty of good stuff. Pity it foundered. All the more reason to have a LitFest in the area. Let's fly the flag!

Below, Sally Thums at Radish:

When the Wind Changed

The excellent Leeds-based Theatre Company BlahBlahBlah  took part in the second Headingley LitFest in 2009, premiering their show When the Wind Changed to delighted parents and children in the library. It's still going strong:

Throughout March the Blahs will be spending a day at a time in schools across Yorkshire, performing When the Wind Changed four times in the morning for Reception children, each performance lasting half an hour. In the afternoon they will do two performances of their show Max for Yr 1 / Yr 2 children, each show lasting forty-five minutes.

When the Wind Changed is a story about a girl whose face gets stuck by the wind when it changes. All manner of people's faces have been stuck by this mysterious wind. When Gran realises that wiping that look off her granddaughter's face isn't going to work, her only advice is to "wait for the wind to change again". They wait... and they wait... and they wait. And then the wind begins to blow...

Max is based on the Maurice Sendak picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Max has been up to mischief and is sent to his room without any supper. We sit with the children around a blank canvas which becomes Max's bedroom that turns into a forest. They travel with him in and out of weeks to Where the Wild Things Are. The children meet Wild Things seven times bigger than themselves and must help Max find ways to tame them without hurting them.

If you can make it, you are invited to dip into the day and see the participatory work in action. Visitor places are limited to three a day. You can book your place by contacting Cas Bulmer on 0113 274 0030 or at cas@blahs.co.uk. Please give plenty of notice so that the necessary arrangements with the schools can be made.

Publish your own?

For fun and profit? Depressed by rejection slips? Fed up with being a would-be? You could come in with the tide - read this - or you could cheer yourself up on Wednesday 16 March when Isabel Losada addresses us in the Claremont Room at Heart. See the programme. More on Isabel later.

Our part in World Book Night

Headingley LitFest has been chosen by World Book Night to receive forty-eight free copies of Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's. These will be delivered about a fortnight before the LitFest starts, and as we have just received the news, we have yet to decide the mechanics of distribution. The official World Book Night is on Saturday 5 March.

Alan Bennett is, just in case you don't know, one of our local literary heroes, who attended the school which is now known as Lawnswood, and who lived over his father's butcher's shop opposite the Three Horseshoes pub, now known as Royale Dry Cleaning.

Lesley McDowell wrote in the Independent in May:

Alan Bennett's memoir of his parents' marriage and his mother's battles with depression is clear-eyed, touching, occasionally waspish, not always charitable, and ever honest. The discovery in later life that his maternal grandfather committed suicide is, he tells us, the kind of thing a writer longs for, to spice up a dull, normal family story. But, of course, no family is ever really dull or normal, and no family is ever "like other people's", however much one might strive for it to be so.

You can read the rest by clicking here.

Reviews from anyone else are welcome.

Congratulations, Jo Shapcott

Congratulations to Jo Shapcott from Headingley admirers for winning the general Costa Book Award. Individual winners are selected from five categories: novel, first novel, biographical work, poetry volume and children’s book. These winners are then put back into the competition and an overall winner comes out – with a prize of £35,000. This year, Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability took it, narrowly beating Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes.

Help us with publicity

The LitFest programme leaflets have now been printed. If you want some to give out, please email here. You could also ask for the pdf of the programme, then send it on to people in your address book.


Don't forget to add the LitFest if you use Facebook: click on the icon top right. 

Peter Lorre - one of the greats

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Peter Lorre appears in the LitFest’s showing of The Beast With Five Fingers at the Cottage Road Cinema on Monday 21 March at 7.30pm. He stands out, almost inevitably, from the other actors in a strong cast, and not simply because of his reputation: he is genuinely one of the greats. The screenplay, taken from a short story by W F  Harvey, one-time resident of Headingley, is a little daft, but there’s the horror genre for you. It’s still very enjoyable.

His voice . . . face . . . the way he moved . . . laughed  -   he was the most identifiable actor I have ever known. (Vincent Price)

His ‘real’ name was László Löwenstein, and the languages of his youth would have included Hungarian, German, and probably Yiddish, because he was born in 1904 in Rózsahegy (now Ružomberok in Slovakia, then in the Kingdom of Hungary) to a fairly well-off Jewish family. He was educated in Vienna and became a bank clerk to please his father, in spite of his fascination with theatre.

Membership of a theatre group which specialized in improvisation led him to stages in Breslau (now Wrocław), Zurich and Berlin, where he became famous for his interpretation of Danton in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Bertholt Brecht took a great linking to him, and cast him in his Happy End and Man Equals Man. In 1931 the film director Fritz Lang cast him as a psychopathic child murderer in his first talkie, which had the short title of M. This caused something of a sensation, and Lorre began to be careful about typecasting. However, although he starred in a fair number of German films after M, people remembered it rather too well, and in 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who was deeply interested in the power of film (just like his master Hitler, whose favourite film was Lives of a Bengal Lancer) sanctioned the use of Lorre’s image on a poster advertising the anti-semitic The Eternal Jew. Lorre was supposed to look like a typical Jew. Sinister, that is…

Lorre took the hint and got out. In England, he quickly teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock to become a villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much, then sailed to the United States to star in Mad Love and to become the Japanese sleuth Mr Moto. His international reputation, which was substantial, escalated to stellar heights when he appeared in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. After the War, still sensitive (rather late in the day) about typecasting, he appeared in The Beast With Five Fingers and similar films. He finished his career with a series of character parts in the likes of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Ben Okri booked for the LitFest

Ben Okri, one of the most acclaimed African writers within the postcolonial tradition, will be speaking on the afternoon of the final Saturday of the Headingley LitFest (26 March) at the brilliantly refurbished Heart centre in Bennett Road.


Often described as a 'magic realist', Okri's novels and poems are written in English but draw heavily on Yoruba myths, stories and culture.  Praised for his experiments with new literary forms, he is probably best known for The Famished Road, which won him the Booker Prize in 1991. In this, African and European literary traditions meet, in a story narrated by a 'spirit-child' who moves between the worlds of spirits and human beings, observing the chaotic history of his country. There is plenty in it about corruption - economic and political - in modern Nigeria, and about the devastation brought by war.


I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.


The oral storytelling tradition of Africa is a powerful influence, and Okri has added Ancient Greek legends, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dickens to the list. Those who want to do some background reading before 26 March in addition to our guest's work might like to read the classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Okri's poem The Awakening, written to mark the Millennium, appears on this Oxfam Cool Planet website, and you can find a full bibliography and biography on this British Council website.


Tickets are not yet available for this, or any other event, because the programme's final details are still being sewn up, but if you want to express on interest in the Ben Okri event, email your details.  


Other guests include Rommi Smith, who works to fuse spoken word and music, the writer, singer and former television producer Isabel Losada, who will give a presentation on how to get published, Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, which specialises in rediscovered inter-war novels by neglected women writers and a flock of female poets called Wordbirds.

Three people with the surname Brown will take part – Dr Richard Brown, who will talk about novelist and critic Storm Jameson, Ray Brown, who will talk about his plays for radio and Wes Brown, who has had his first novel published in his early twenties. 

Veteran writer for teenagers Robert Swindells (Stone Cold, Brother in the Land) will speak to Year 9 students at Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School, other high schools will hold poetry slams and the Flux Gallery will show a film about Irish writers and also host the launch of poet Genny Rahtz’s collection Sky Burial.

There will also be 'house events', following last year's successes, on Sunday 20 March. Apart from the Heart Centre, things will take place at the New Headingley Club, the Lento Café on North Lane, the LS6 (Clock) café on Headingley Lane, the Flux Gallery on Midland Road, Headingley Library and local high schools.


*Now read about what happened:

http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.com/2011/03/ben-okri-in-headingley.html