Kay Mellor in the New Headingley Club

Kay Mellor in New Headingley Club.   Photo by Richard Wilcocks

Sally Bavage writes:

Tea and homemade cake - the walnut sponge was chosen by our guest - revived the forty or so frozen souls who battled in to the New Headingley Club on Saturday afternoon for a question-and-answer session with our very own heroine, scriptwriter, actress, director - and much more besides.  And Kay's smile and personality would melt the North Pole.  Chutzpah. Pizzazz.  Whatever the word, she has it.

What scripts hasn't Kay written over the past decades!   Theatre first, after her schooldays at West Park School and her degree in Drama from the sadly-missed Bretton Hall.  Each had one inspiring teacher who had recognised her natural writing talent and given her encouragement to “just get it down in writing.” Kay has a perceptive eye for detail, a keen ear for dialogue and an ability to bring people to life so vividly that we can probably all name someone in our own lives who is just like one of her characters.  As she lives very locally, it could indeed be us!  She confessed that she does use her friends, family, those she meets casually, dinner party conversations, what she reads  - all of these as inspiration for her storytelling.  

Her latest story, The Syndicate, series two, had just started on BBC1, and we were treated to some tantalising glimpses of the second episode which hint at what lies in store for the new Lottery-winning characters who work in the lower end of the embattled NHS.  Celebrations of the win are clearly foreshadowed, with some jealousy and heartache to come - but without these it wouldn't be a Kay Mellor script.  She finds people endlessly fascinating and has no desire yet to write her autobiography whilst the ordinary lives of others in extraordinary circumstances provide such rich material.

Unlike series such as Band of Gold, wich she researched with Bradford sex workers, she prepared for this by talking to Lottery winners over the telephone rather than immersing herself deeply in their lives.  She incorporates psychology as well to carry the story and does not write for a particular actor, but does her homework thoroughly then just writes fluently and keeps going.  When asked why she had used the Syndicate theme for a second series, as with other themes on which she has written several series, she made it clear that she stops when she has said what she wanted to say, explored all facets of people's characters and captured the 'Zeitgeist'.  The Syndicate gave her a vehicle to examine the life-changing consequences of rags-to-riches, and the follow-on story holds less interest for her. She is not impelled to write a moral tale, just to tell a tale and pose questions that leave viewers the opportunity to engage with their own viewpoint.

“Would she ever set her stories outside West Yorkshire?”  she was asked. She countered that she knows the area, lives here in Leeds and loves the place and the people.  The theme for this year's LitFest 2013: Lives and Loves in a nutshell.  Would she respond to the blandishments of Steven Spielberg and move to Hollywood? No again, although a small part of her would love to have that power to produce blockbuster film scripts like Richard Curtis - but family and especially the grandchildren exerted a far greater pull than anything Steven could come up with.  We laughed at her anecdotes of being in conversation with the great mogul himself.  Steven?  Steven who?  Sorry, I'm losing signal - I'll call back after my granddaughter has finished in Topshop.  She is now overseeing the two writers working on the US version of The Syndicate and does get to go to Tinseltown rather than Tinshill just occasionally.

Yes, she does receive a huge amount of mail, not just fan mail, but often from viewers who have been so touched by her stories that they send her very personal information, cries for help really.  She does answer them, briefly, and feels privileged that so many trust her with their confessions.  She also had some advice for young writers trying to 'make it.'  “Can you write your story premise in six lines?”  It is the idea that is the most important thing; good writing will only hang from a sound structural base.  

The choice of which actors will deliver the dialogue she has crafted is negotiated with the producer and casting director after she has written the part. Only once did she dislike who had been cast for a leading role and have to go away to re-write to play to the strengths of the actress.  On that early occasion it was an improvement, but it doesn't happen nowadays.  She produces real dialogue, in two columns, so that it can be intercut, interjections made, overlapped, cut off - just as in real life.  Real conversations in other words - just as we could hear in the audience as we were leaving; even from Finlay who at 19 weeks old was probably the youngest member of any of our audiences this year.

And her ambitions for the future?  Well, 'Steven' had suggested she really ought to write and direct movies, but they would have to be about 'her people', the ones she knows and whose voices she can hear.  Perhaps … watch this space?  She is still very busy running a business and ensuring that what she wants to talk about gets transferred to an audience.  When asked, now that she is growing older, if she thought she would write more parts for older people, she agreed - the babyboomers in her own life gave lots of scope for future plotting.  Scriptwriting for the theatre, the television and other media was still a delightful way to earn a living - if Shakespeare did it, then it was good enough for her!

And finally, does she play the Lottery herself?  No, she has enough richness in her life and is happy to follow the maxim of Ian Fleming when he said “It reads better than it lives.” Our audience plunged out into the freezing spring weather, replete with cake, and looking forward to the next instalments of local life, and the life of locals, that Kay can craft.  Will we be in it? - that may be another story!

Trio Literati - Straight from the Heart

Roger McGough in the Howard Assembly Room

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Roger McGough did not disappoint: the capacity audience at the magnificent Howard Assembly Room loved him to bits. As he read from As Far As I Know, adding witty commentary and extra personal narratives, the laughs and murmurs of appreciation came at frequent intervals, in spite of (because of?) the melancholy subject matter – moving poems on growing old, lost youth, love and death. At one point he reminded me of the comedian Paul Merton, not in appearance but in the wordplay, the wit and the ability to see things afresh, from interesting angles. At another point I was struck by the dark cloud I saw looming behind some of the poems, Knock Knock for example:

The man from the murder

Still on the loose

The man from the nightmare

The man from the fear…

…Did I hear someone knock

Who’s that at the door?

Or in Nice Try:

As we speak, they’re out there

Scythes at the ready, playing hide and seek.

Me under a bush, you in the shade

Someone counting to ten, sharpening a blade.

And I amongst many was deeply impressed by Not For Me a Youngman’s Death, an update on possibly his most famous poem of the Sixties, when he was more fast-living and went to all-night parties, Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death. It was suggested by Carol Ann Duffy, and he tells us about what it’s like now:

My nights are rarely unruly.

My days of all-night parties

Are over, well and truly.

No mistresses no red sports cars

No shady deals no gangland bars

No drugs no fags no rock ‘n’ roll

Time alone has taken its toll

Creating a league table of top contemporary poets is likely to be at best contentious, at worst woundingly humiliating, but that is what the poetic powers-that-be did four decades ago. They were connected with Poetry Review, the influential magazine of the Poetry Society, and included the likes of Andrew Motion, our previous poet laureate. Roger McGough, often associated by commentators with The Beatles, popular and famous as a member of The Scaffold with its Lily The Pink and Aintree Iron, a Liverpudlian with working class origins, was put into the ranks of the second division, at the bottom. That’s the problem with popularity – some people think you can’t be profound as well, and that to be clever you have to be arcane. Perhaps it was thought simply that the scousers were getting above themselves.

It rankled with him, and now it comes out in this latest collection. One  poem in it which he did not read – Scorpio – begins with what the popular John Betjeman wrote: ‘Our poems are part of ourselves. They are our children and we do not like them to be made public fools of by strangers’. McGough continues:

...

I will never reveal the names of those strangers,

Fellow poets some of them, and literary critics

Who have made public fools of my children.

They know who they are. Those still alive, that is.

Their names inscribed on the base of a paperweight.

But McGough rises above mere spleen-venting, which is not his style, as anyone who has been charmed by him as the presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please well knows. He is, in fact, a bit of a saint, the ‘patron saint of poetry’ in the words of today’s poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and the wheel has turned: in addition to being a CBE, he is the new President of the Poetry Society. There are certain ironies to savour there. 

Love Lines - Teresa Brayshaw and Friends in HEART Café

Sally Bavage writes:

Escorted individually to our allotted seats in the pop-up 'restaurant' with communal refectory-style table, for one night only in the Heart café, audience members were immediately immersed in the evening's glamorous yet mysterious atmosphere created by the 'cast.'  “Glass of wine?”  “Do sit here and make yourself comfortable.”   “Help yourself to the grapes.”  Scattered hearts on the red and white tablecloths, live and mellow notes from 'Blue Moon' and 'Funny Valentine' set the mood.  Expectant.  Intrigued.

The 'cast' of nine performers sat amongst the 'guests' at the table and began to speak to each other, and us, about love. We talk of it, plead for it, cry about it, don't we? We write of it, don't we? - letters, emails, texts.  We skype, meet, date, don't we?  So love 'lines' - from sonnets and songs, from films and poems - were sent across the table in a medley of conversations that mixed medium with message.  

Lines were started at one place, continued through time and place, source and country and ended up echoing round the table in ghostly fragments of conversations.  Like the love lines and lifelines on our palms, talking of love is endless.

Mollie Bloom discoursed movingly on it.  Jack and Rose from the Titanic pledged to each other within our earshot.  Shakespeare questioned us from the distant past, answered by conversations between lovers from a more recent age.  Loving messages and refrains from across the centuries 'spoke' to each other across the years.  Was that Pliny? Henry the Eighth?  Rosa Luxembourg?  Mrs Beeton?  Admiral Nelson?  Napoleon? Empress Josephine?  Robert Burns?  Mrs Wordsworth?  Lord Byron?  Shirley Bassey?  The Artist Formerly Known As Prince?  Frank Sinatra?  Oscar Wilde?  Robert Browning?  John Lennon?  







Yes, imagine all of them in the room conversing about their desires and longings, setbacks and joys, domestic disasters and sexual frissons.  Could we spot the joins in these conversations?  No, there is a universal language that lovers use not bound by time or date - the same sweeping human emotions seem to have been expressed in words that differ little from age to age.  “Give me my memories” begs one rejected lover.  Like letters from the front in WW1, the words sent back and forth between separated lovers in post-war Russia echo the pain of those distanced from all that is human and warm.  

Like an audience at the ballet or opera, the 'guests' wanted to clap each individual piece that was both clever and affecting but we could not, and did not, break the mood and spoil the moments.  A final refrain from “Until we meet again” seemed most apt, as the 'guests' fervently asserted that we hope it will be at next year's LitFest!

An hour of truly absorbing entertainment, with masterful performances in memorisation, song and playing of parts from a committed cast and technical support team that included those returning especially from Spain, France and points of the English compass.  For love, naturally.  Commissioned for LitFest 2013, this premiere performance owes many thanks to: Steve Atkinson, Teresa Brayshaw, Hannah Butterfield, Lisa Fallon, Joely Fielding, Louise Hill, Rochnee Mehta, Emma Sargison, Noel Witts - with support from Charlotte Blackburn and Matt Sykes-Hooban. Oliver Bray took photos and Ben Mills filmed the event.

Lives and Loves - a celebration

Richard Wilcocks writes:
This annual event, made possible by the generosity of Jimbo’s Fund, was as stimulating and emotional as ever. It was compered this year by James Nash, who introduced each reader with his habitual good humour, making helpful comments and observations where necessary. James is the tutor for one of the two creative writing groups involved – the Osmondthorpe Writers – and he sat at the front next to the tutor of the other one, based at HEART, Alison Taft. The new experience of reading their own work in front of a strange audience -  an extremely supportive one it must be said - required courage from some of the readers, but there was no lack of that.

Michael Taylor sang Lonely Girl from memory, and was much appreciated. Less melancholy was Lee Rowley, whose love poem Laura could easily be set to music. Joe Geraghty’s short story was about sneezing, handkerchiefs and perfume as well as love, with amusing references to hay fever and Piriton, and Richard Sharpe’s My Girlfriend was full of charm. Siobhan Maguire Broad’s nostalgic Why I love films included her fond memories of eating sugar jellies, The Jungle Book and old cinemas filled with cigarette smoke, Carl Flynn gave us his neatly-rhymed Don’t touch me without not a glance at the script and Ted Gregory read a colleague’s collection of childhood memories from Summer 1956.

Geoffrey Vickers’s Letter Home was from a soldier to his sweetheart back at home, the one whose photo he carries in a leather case, and David Newton’s The Place I Love, with its carefully-crafted abrupt, short phrases was about flying Chinook helicopters in dangerous circumstances, Vietnam for example. Both of these could return for next year’s LitFest, the theme of which will be Conflict.

Mandey Hudson made us laugh with her Elephants, huge creatures who have to be shampooed, and Moira Garland delivered two literary tours de force  with a brief story – Balloons – and a funny-but-true tale about not getting around to actually writing the three hundred words required for the weekly creative writing session entitled Ode To The Procrastination of Writing. Heads nodded in recognition as she read. She was followed by Winkie Whiteley reading her moving The thing I love – Mum.

Caroline Wilkinson’s adventurous This Block was made up largely of short phrases – “hungry for the touch”, “deafening closeness” -  and was a kind of celebration of movement and the senses, as associated with lovers. Fabian Merinyo-Shirima, who originates from Tanzania, read Kilimanjaro, and warned me to be careful if I ever tried to climb the mountain, because there have been so many fatalities. His poem was full of information, like an article in National Geographic Magazine, together with a feeling of love for his homeland.

Ted Gregory read Michael Freeman’s Don’t Lose Your Paddle with aplomb, a sad story of loathing between two siblings, one of whom tries to drown out memories with alcohol, and Ruth Middleton, in her true-to-life Creating a Ripple, put her focus on the everyday nature of a woman’s existence. Robert Thorpe’s I love helicopters included his thoughts on the pleasures of cleaning the machines, and Unwind by Howard Benn was a beautiful concluding piece: “The sun tucks down beneath the sheets… while lovers do battle in their beds…”

Information about the creative writing classes run by the WEA can be found on www.wea.org.uk or by contacting alistaft@aol.com or james@jamesnash.co.uk

Rebel Girls/The Woodhouse Woman

Jill Liddington

Lucy Bourne, Maggie Mash, Beth Kilburn

Mary Francis writes:
Headingley Library was packed out for this lively double bill. The event was inspired by Jill Liddington's superb research into little known Yorkshire fighters for women's suffrage.

Rebel Girls, the book, published in 2006, is a tour de force - and also a riveting read! It features an astonishing number of local women - from a range of backgrounds and from the West Riding in particular - whose lives, exploits and sometimes even names had slipped into obscurity. It gives the lie to the notion that only middle and upper class women were interested in women’s rights and truly makes you understand the courage that it took at that time to step forward - out of line and into the front line, with all the vitriol and abuse that generally followed.

Jill talked about three women from Leeds who epitomised the waves of the early 20th century movement: Isabella Ford, the wealthy suffragist who introduced the issues to ordinary women in Leeds but did not want to go to extremes: Mary Gawthorpe, the diminutive working class woman from Woodhouse who was prepared to go to prison for the cause, and Leonora Cohen, who progressed from making marmalade for the Suffrage Movement to nearly dying from her hunger strike.

Questions from an enthralled audience ranged from the problems of researching 'ordinary' women (including the value of the internet, especially when subjects had moved to other countries in later life) to the impact of the Russian revolution in precipitating change.

Jill's review of the facts was followed by an imaginative dramatization of key moments in the life of Mary Gawthorpe by members of Theatre of the Dales. This wonderful drama, commissioned by Headingley LitFest and supported by the Arts Council, explored Mary's motivation through events from her childhood; changing her name from Nellie to a more forceful and admired Mary, and led us into the sheer exhilaration of being caught up in an inspiring movement that moved from protest to prison.

We went home humming suffragette songs. A brilliant evening!

Click here to go to Jill Liddington's website

Photos by Richard Wilcocks

Meanwhile, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

Sally Bavage and Mary Francis write:

 Saturday afternoon saw a huge audience hear Benjamin Zephaniah (author of the book Refugee Boy) and Lemn Sissay (adaptor of the work for the stage) in conversation - and what a joyful occasion it was! A fascinating session in which both writers were thoughtful, informative and funny.

Eight years after Zephaniah first received requests for a stage adaptation of his book, he had agreed and, because he knew Sissay, had then left it all to him. On Saturday last he had not at that time even seen the play, though was to do so later.

We learned a great deal more about the two men as they talked and responded to a host of questions, including some things quite surprising - to me, at least. One such snippet was that when poet Benjamin Zephaniah was about to attempt his first novel he asked for advice on how to begin from a friend of his, the very successful writer of historical novels, Philippa Gregory - and her advice was spot-on!

.. and so to the play itself.

Powerful.  Thought-provoking.  An emotional journey.  All well-tried phrases but nevertheless very apt descriptions of a must-see new performance in the Courtyard theatre.  Above the display of art in the Courtyard foyer is the phrase: “A story about arriving, belonging and finding home.”  This adaptation explores this theme through the eyes of Alem, the Refugee Boy, whose arrival and wait for family to claim him takes us all on a journey.

The sense of displacement starts with the ingenious set of many piled suitcases and there are many narrative metaphors for the changes in Alem, his new friends and his families whose lives subtly intertwine. Politics determines his journey from Africa to England and his moves round the south.  What is the meaning of ‘home’ when yours is destroyed, moved, changed? Your cultural references change?  Your food and language adapt?  You will ponder as you leave the theatre to go home – wherever that is.

The play runs until 30 March.

Tell It Your Way, with the Yarnsmith of Norwich

Sheila Chapman writes:

4pm, Saturday 16 March, New Headingley Club

We were called from our lovely tea and cakes (thanks to Leeds Voice Day) by the beating of a drum to meet our mediaeval tale teller, Dave Tonge.

We sat in a semi-circle around Dave and the children sat on the sheepskin rugs on the floor. Dave started by asking us to solve a riddle. It was a long riddle (as befits a story teller) involving a bird asleep on the branch of a tree, our desperate need for the wood from the branch and , here’s the catch, the fact that the branch needed to be taken without disturbing the bird, for if the bird was disturbed  something nasty would happen. All our suggested solutions to the riddle were useless and we grew increasingly desperate. Someone even suggested shooting the bird but we passed on very quickly from that being all very sound Headingley anti-blood sport types.  In the end a wise-woman in the front row suggested we might wait until the bird woke up and flew away – of course that was the answer, doh!!!

And so the afternoon went on. Robin Hood won an archery competition (we gasped as he and his opponents demonstrated their skill and we applauded the final winning shots), a young man searched for and found his luck (it was NOT a happy ending), a man regretted finding a voice for his beautiful wife who had been previously dumb and, finally, it was proven that women are definitely brainier than men – wild cheers from the audience!

Throughout the event the children wriggled and squirmed on the rugs, they shot their hands in the air to answer questions, made off-the-wall suggestions for plot improvement and were so captivated by Dave’s performance that when he suggested, at one stage, that we might all draw closer they practically climbed in his pockets.

It was a terrific afternoon and Dave truly earned his title – Master Storyteller.

Sally Bavage writes:

Witty raconteur?  Life and soul of the party?  Dinner party leading light?  Thought not!  If you haven’t got one of those endless self-help books, then you should have come to this entertaining workshop giving hints and tips for those wishing to be any/all of the above, or intending teachers, or conference speakers …

One thing stood out amongst all the others at this afternoon event in the New Headingley Club – the sound of laughter.  Not polite, either – appreciative and joyful.  From first to last, Dave Tonge managed to coax a group of strangers to listen to him raptly, then interact with and perform to each other.

Tips on breathing, changes in voice, the use of gestures (appropriate for the age of the audience), the stance you use, using your eyes to capture and hold inclusive attention -  were all rehearsed.  The group tried telling a short story without using their hands or body movements – almost impossible.  Visualise the story you want to tell, chunk it down into comic-strip bite sizes – for if you The Narrator can ‘see’ the story then you can ensure your audience gets the picture too. And stories are pretty universal; there is not much alteration of the plotlines involved, more the adaptation of the tips above to carry the story to a mixed range of ages.

Record your story to hear it as a listener might, then refine it for pace, pitch and tone.  Write down keywords if it helps you to string it together coherently, using pauses and repeats to get the “Ooh”, the “Boo” and the “Hurrah” that you want. Above all, be yourself and share rather than perform.

Our Yarnsmith did indeed share and left a happy workshop wanting more. They got more too, as Dave went on to put his mouth where his tips were and, after tea and cake, led another session entitled Tavern Yard Tales. But that’s another story….

Our thanks to Leeds Voice Day who sponsored this event.

Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones

Linzhu Deng (Felicity) writes:

Hilary Spurling

Before the lecture, I didn’t know Pearl Buck's work very well. I knew her name but I’ve never read her book, to be honest, because what I’ve read during my school years are those famous books written by Chinese writers like Mao Dun and Ba Jin. Today, I’ve heard a lecture about her life and books and I’ve got really interested in reading them, but one thing that I find very interesting is that she was the public enemy in China at that time and at the same time, not very welcome in the US because she stood up for China. The words “public enemy” caught my mind, and after the lecture I did a little bit of research about her and found that some of our well-known Chinese writers at her time accused her of being unrealistic in writing about Chinese society and of her limitation of vision which was from the perspective of a missionary’s daughter. Controversial as it is, it’s impossible for me to judge anything unless I read her books on my own. However, this lecture has indeed given me some views about China from a brand new perspective.

Jing Zhang (Maggie) writes:
After the talk, one word emerged in my mind: “bridge”. Pearl Buck built a “bridge” between the western world and China. But now my perspective has been directed to another way that it was indeed a difficult task to build this bridge, because she spoke Chinese with yellow hair and blue eyes in China, and she found herself failing to fit into American society when she had to go back. Nobody but Pearl herself knew how much misunderstanding, stress and other hardship she had suffered. Fortunately, she was accepted by both sides: she became a Nobel Prize winner as well as a great friend of the Chinese people

Li Hu (Lily) writes:
The speech given by Hilary Spurling is quite fascinating and inspirational, which is not only about Pearl Buck and her lifetime, but also a sketch of China's 20th history. At first, she talked about
her interest in China, which originated from a book read by her mother, The Chinese Children Next Door. Hilary thought Pearl Buck's books, especially The Good Earth, open a door for westerners to learn about China, which was not possible back in several decades. Nowadays, even most Chinese people have no idea what looked like in China in 1920s, because most people that time are illiterates so that they could not put down their daily life and their feelings. But Pearl Buck did the job, and to some extent, she offers a differing perspective as an American.

Besides, there are two things which drew my attention. One is the novel (The Good Earth) itself, which is somehow not qualified for some critics, as the language itself is quite magazinelike. But
what makes it extraordinary is its unique setting, which build a connection between the west and the orient. It also help people think the misunderstanding between peoples and possibly try to find a way to warm up relations. The other thing is that apart from the fact that the Pulizer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature Pear Buck had won, the thing makes her so extraordinary lies in the fact that she did make huge contribution to understanding between the two worlds and few people have managed to do it. The realistic condition Chinese farmers in 1920s had endured arouses empathy among different groups, especially those who have similar life experience.

Sally Bavage writes: 
A chilly evening but a very warm welcome for a slightly jet-lagged Hilary Spurling, just back from Texas, as she braved the stand-up journey from London (no seats, no manners) and the flakes of snow to come to Headingley LitFest and give a rapt audience an insight into an extraordinary woman.

Her book, entitled Burying the Bones, outlines the life of Pearl Buck over the earlier part of her life growing up in China (and speaking Chinese, the ordinary language of farming folk, before she spoke English).  The title refers to the Chinese habit of burying the traumas of their life - 'inscrutable' is often used - as well as young Pearl's exploits as she played outside her missionary parents' home in the surrounding fields and interred, with dignity, the bones (and other gruesome body parts) left after feral dogs had devoured the mostly-female babies left to die or rot outside the village.  Her childhood and early years of marriage to John Lossing Buck (another extraordinary person committed to China and its people) were spent in a range of places, all providing endless degrees of hardship along with fascination for the society  and its culture.

Pearl S Buck

However, Hilary first outlined what had brought her to writing this biographical tour-de-force, winner of the James Tait Black prize, many five-star reviews and serialisation recently on Radio 4's 'book of the week'.  As a pre-school child she had adored a simple book The Chinese Children Next Door, where Pearl had used the many stories she had heard told to her missionary mother when a small child herself to craft a thinly-disguised fiction.  This picture book showed - to a child brought up in the wartime grey dullness of Stockport - an astonishing life full of colour, games, and exoticism.  Hilary's lifelong fascination for China began at three years old and has lasted for seven decades.

Hilary also gave the audience a brief contextual account, gleaned from her many research travels in the China of today, of the world that Pearl had inhabited and just how it has changed.  Pearl was always a passionate advocate of China, knowing the rural lifestyle from within, and foresaw it becoming a 'superpower' as early as 1925.  A pity, then, that she was regarded with some suspicion in the America to which she had to return in 1934 and which ignored her observations.   She was to become a Public Enemy in China, after the Cultural Revolution, where it was considered her frankness in writing about sexual mores and grinding, brutal poverty was unacceptable.  She was also outside the norm in an America that first rewarded her with a Pulitzer prize for her most famous novel The Good Earth, awarded her the Nobel prize for Literature and then put her under FBI surveillance for her advocacy of China.  Good, then, that in modern China there are now 'shrines' marking the places where she once lived.  There is still some ambivalence towards her in official circles but it is clear that her record of life during the early part of the 20th century is, quite simply, a unique record that could only have been written by the sharply-perceptive bilingual author who lived in two worlds.

In the end, Hilary felt, Pearl had cared more about her campaigning - for many causes unpopular at the time, including women, blacks, minorities, children - than fine writing.  Although she could have been a first-class writer she used her writing to explore the real lives of ordinary people - and became rich in fandom and finances in the process.  “I am an American by birth and by ancestry … but my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China.” 

Pearl's writing style, immediate and vivid, was exactly mirrored by Hilary's prose in her biography and in her presentation; pacy, colourful, full of anecdote and brio, expertly built on the record of evidence that Pearl's many books and articles left us. The audience were treated to a real insight (I was going to say 'pearls of wisdom' but thought better of it) into the commitment a writer needs to illuminate the lives of others.  Pearl and Hilary both. 

Ray Brown - Maria's House

Richard Wilcocks writes:

In  a warm front room, we ate wedges of a chocolate cake which would have made Nigella green with envy, cursed the weather outside and listened to Ray Brown. It was my idea of a house event: friendly, intimate, stimulating and… sweetly nourishing.

Ray Brown

Ray began by talking about work in progress, about how writing plays is totally different from writing prose and about how playwrights often steal from each other. David Nobbs had, in fact, once slunk up to him to apologise for stealing a single word - 'seemly'. He told us about the creative writing class he had once run and about the rules he set: every member had to bring what they had written to every session and read it out, at risk of exclusion from the session. “It's always the ones who don't write anything who criticise the most.”

Then came the flash fiction, flash because it didn't last long and flashy because it was well honed. The first was set in the seventies, at a time when the leaders of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraction) in West Germany - Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof - had yet to commit suicide, and was about a mysterious someone traveling out of Germany to Schipol airport in the Netherlands who may or may not be a terrorist or a drug dealer. The second was set in Headingley, “which has always been a mixed area full of interesting people - the Hampstead of Leeds as it were…” Entitled The Gift, it was written, like the first, at a time when Ray lived in Headingley. “I used to write about dying and making love,” he said, “and I was fascinated by the heartbeat in this story. It has a basis in a relationship I had.” The repetition of words and phrases helps provide the heartbeat.

Maria's House came next. It is not flash fiction, but a longer piece which came out of a time when Ray was working as a writer-in-residence at Dove House in Chamberlain Road, Hull and another  hospice just outside Lincoln. He turned the story into a play for radio, which has never been produced. He read beautifully, using a credible Lincs accent where necessary, and explained to us that the character Maria was his opportunity for an imaginative link with a place which is like another home for him - Mala Brda (it means 'little hill') which is in Slovenia, near the famous Postojna caves, and not too far from the Italian city of Trieste. 

He gave Maria, an old woman who lives in a hospice, a really convincing Italian accent in his reading - she calls him "Ha-Ray". She had, long ago, been part of the Italian community in Istria, which had once been overwhelmed by Mussolini's fascist forces and which had now been reclaimed by Slovenia and Croatia. Ray is a frequent visitor to those parts, so when, in his fiction, he visits Maria's house, having been given the key by Maria, he is visiting a real house from his experience. It is “overshadowed by a giant chestnut tree” and he rides a Tomos moped (the headquarters of the company which makes them is in Koper, Slovenia) on the roads near it. “Sretan Put!” he is told: “Pleasant journey!” in Croatian. Yes, Ray knows those parts, and something of the tortured history: one character makes a reference to when “Stalin was threatening to shake his little finger at Tito”. 

“I wanted to hint at the enormous richness of experience in that country,” he told one questioner when he had finished.

Theatre of the Dales - Literary Lovers

Jane Oakshott, Dave Robertson, Maggie Mash 

Mary Francis writes:
This was a performance by members of Theatre of the Dales in association with Trio Literati - and, as always, they were a joy to watch! Literary Lovers is the very apt title for the adaptation of letters between George Bernard Shaw and two very famous actresses of the day - Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who seems to have been known to her friends as Mrs. Pat).

Dave Robertson was a wonderful Shaw, with his delightful leading ladies being Maggi Mash as Ellen Terry and Jane Oakshott as Mrs. Pat - both inhabiting their roles beautifully.

From today’s perspective, it is quite remarkable that Shaw - a prodigious worker in so many literary fields, - should have written over 250,000 letters apparently and conducted such amazing correspondences with a range of different people. Over 3000 letters survive from his relationship with Ellen Terry, whom he vowed never to meet in person, and in them he is sometimes loving, sometimes chiding, sometimes full of advice, sometimes exasperated. With Mrs. Pat he seems to have begun, in his role as theatre critic, by praising highly or criticizing strongly her various stage performances, but later became quite infatuated with her. With both women, though sometimes they appear to have been grateful for his advice and suggestions, one senses his exasperation as they ignore his business ideas in particular - and indeed his feelings about the men in their lives!

But it is not only Shaw’s character that comes across so strongly from these letters and their adaptation, for the two actresses write with equal affection, passion and, very often, equal conviction, - and they generally know their own minds very well indeed! They are very real women and it is so good to hear their voices.

Many thanks to the three performers for an entrancing show! 

George Szirtes and Kim Moore in HEART Café

Doug Sandle writes:

Kim Moore and George Szirtes

The yellow daffodils on the HEART café tables provided a freshness and uplifting ambiance to contrast to the damp and cold of a winter outstaying its yearly visit, a fitting setting for an evening that lifted the spirits and warmed the soul with readings from George Szirtes, ably supported by Kim Moore.  Bringing together one of our foremost poets with a prodigious body of a lifetime’s work and literary achievements with a young poet, successfully emerged rather than emerging but one nevertheless at an earlier stage of her poetic journey, worked very well for a LitFest whose aspiration is both to bring to Headingley established writers and also to encourage and nurture younger talent.

I was delighted to introduce George, having been one of his lecturers and tutors at the Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) when from 1969 to 1972 he was a fine art student. Both his life at Leeds and continuing interest in visual art featured among several of the poems he presented. A connection with his former student days was the poem Poet about Martin Bell, who was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University 1967 to 1969 but who thereafter taught at Leeds Polytechnic for a time and who was very influential in nurturing  creative writing among the students (and staff) of the art and design department. Poet makes reference to James Thompson's City of Dreadful Night which was parodied in the title of Martin’s powerful response to and critique of the Leeds of the sixties, the City of Dreadful Nothing. Bell’s poem refers to the  ‘Merrion Centre with its special subways for mugging’ and the Merrion Centre receives a mention in another Leeds related poem read by George, Chuck Berry Live, which begins

            Too tired to dance with anyone right now

            After the gig, here in the Merrion Centre

            Where Chuck Berry has just taken his bow.

The poem goes on to describe a bleak experience of Leeds, which has much of the tone of

Martin Bell’s City of Dreadful Nothing.  Another poem, Girl Flying recounts an incident when George witnessed a girl student caught by a fierce wind on the steps that led up to the Leeds Polytechnic’s H Block, to such an extent she was blown into the air and which stirred his imagination to imagine her flying:

            When she stood at the top of the stairs by the door

            of the college, the wind caught her up and so

            she flew all the way down, as if no more

            than a micro-detail on a map that any breeze could blow,

            and if she could have flown of her own will

            at any time she chose, this was how she’d go,

            

These two poems are one of five grouped together under the title Yorkshire Bitter and another read was Night Out, about his experience of a notorious Leeds Pub of the sixties, The Hayfield, a poem, which as in several of his poems, contained references to popular culture of the time with mentions of Jack Palance, Pat Phoenix and Leeds United footballers Sniffer Clarke and Norman Hunter. The poem begins:

            Everyone wears drag around here. The barman

            In gold lamé and vast peroxide wig

            serves pints of Sam Smith to a local Carmen

           

            wearing the cruiser’s full authentic rig

            of white blouse, fish-nets, tiny leather skirt,

            with three day’s stubble, mouth like a ripe fig.

                                   

Visual art, the visual and the painterly is also still a concern as exemplified by poems from A Howard Hodgkin Suite and also from  Minimenta –postcards to Anselm Kiefer. The sensual synaesthetic relationship between colours and the sound of words was evident in a poem entitled Colours, which beings with fourteen lines of colour names – some as in common use and others made up.

            Burlywood, Charteuse, Gainsboro, Ghostwhite, Greenberg,

            Maroon, Orchid, Moccasin, Peru, Demosthenes, Snow,

            Papayawhip, Popper, Peachpuff, Hotpink, Hothot,

            Darkred, Darkgrey, Dodgerblue, Drudgery, Derrida,

         

Some of the poems presented also related to photographs and film or were structured around a  

celebration and exploration of the interrelationships among the forms, patterns and sounds of words. His final poem Say So was much enjoyed by the audience for its musical resonance.

However while the imagery and pictures in his poems are powerful as such, they often rapidly develop and lead us on a journey into the metaphysical and in the case of his reading Seeking North from a sequence entitled Northern Air: A Hungarian Nova Zembla a journey is itself the means for this. His poem Allotment from the Mimimenta –postcards to Anselm Keifer is another example, which begins

            When I glimpse from the train a clutch

            of allotments, a tight row of cabbages or spuds

            or garden peas, I think there are gods

            beyond gods who live in the bones

            of men and women, shivering at their touch;

            that when rain falls it weeps hailstones;

There was much variety in the reading and a personal and moving Prayer for my Daughter will have resonated with parents in the audience and such as Madhouse had political implications.

All together it was a very powerful and inspiring reading and while it was George Szirtes’ first visit to Leeds for a long time, let us hope that it will not be too long before the next one.

Click here to hear six early love poems. 

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Two things in particular struck me as I was listening to Kim Moore read. The first was that she, a mistress of the lyrical, should team up with another musician, or an ensemble, to create new material for new performances: Teaching the Trumpet would be an obvious starting point. It provides good, professional advice:

Imagine you are spitting tea leaves

From your tongue to start each note

 

So each one becomes the beginning of a word.

Sing the note inside your head then match it.

It’s advice which is brought into a new dimension by the closing lines about remembering… the man who played so loud/ he burst a blood vessel in his eye… lines which invite much surmise. Who? When?

The second was the confident way in which she can speak from her own dark depths, like a cave-based oracle or a priestess well in touch with the lupine side, which has been noted by plenty of commentators, lifting off from the terrific title poem of her 2011 pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves. Lupine could indicate sensual or fleshly, but it’s a lot more than that: Today at Wetherspoons demonstrates how tellingly she observes the people she encounters on the shore, in the street, on trains, in pubs:

…The women tilt

in their chairs, laughter faked,

like mugs about to fall, cheekbones

sharp as sadness…

The poem goes on to address matters lupine, or perhaps just seedy:

…My feet slide towards a man

with one hand between his thighs…

The key poem for me on this particular evening was Hartley Street Spiritualist Church. The interest in the dark depths is in there, of course, how could it not be when the church in question has a psychic artist, shudder-inducing mediums (who were trainees, we were told afterwards) and a voice whispering to her that a drawing of an elderly woman with a perm is a depiction of her grandma? But the poem is not really in any gothic domain: there is a hymn by Abba (I believe in angels) and a spirit dog wandering around. The dry humour is delicious.

Her personal narratives – for example one of her more recent poems which is centred on when her husband had a nasty fall in the bathroom – often celebrate the unexpected, or the odd, and then there is always the landscape of  her part of Cumbria looming somewhere behind the characters, a cloudy cyclorama.


Photos by Richard Wilcocks

Blake Morrison - Fiction or Life Writing

 Rebecca Cronin writes:

Softly spoken Yorkshireman Blake Morrison, in conversation with Richard Wilcocks, began with an introduction to Life Writing – what it is, and most importantly, how he makes it interesting. He shared anecdotes concerning his two books about his parents – Things My Mother Never Told Me and When Did You Last See Your Father? – and read passages from both. He centred his discussion around the use of embroidery, which he asserted to be important when fictionalising your characters, yet also spoke strongly about how the personal truths he experienced, and detailed in both books, often resonate well for other people.

Blake Morrison signed dozens of his books

Life writing, when the subject and main characters are not only no longer with you, but are also your parents, would perhaps strike most of us as odd, and perhaps even a task that could be beyond difficult.  But Morrison carried the notion of how for him, writing about his father, and then mother, proved to be a therapeutic and helpful experience, and in many ways, a coping mechanism for their deaths. Writing, he said, is a way to let someone tell a story they need to tell, as well as shaping it, and keeping control of it. Oddly enough, in the beginning, writing existed for him as a mechanism to escape his family, but they ended up being the main characters and roles within his work; they were inescapable. 

When discussing Things My Mother Never Told Me, he explained how his main plot line had revolved around a box of letters his father had left him. The letters provided the majority of the details which make up the book, but naturally left gaps that needed filling. As a forty year-old, reading about the lives of his twenty year-old parents, he expressed almost parental feelings towards them, and often felt that their marriage and his birth were exceptionally unrealistic results of their growing lives. 

The novel of his mother’s life was never something he had expected to write, and he described her as an elusive woman who didn’t enjoy being the topic of conversation. Yet his motivation for writing the book was concentrated around the growing question of why she had buried her Irish Catholic past; a question he strove to answer after learning more and more from the letters. He followed the discussion about the book with a harrowing reading about the immensely high infant mortality rate his grandparents experienced with their own children.

When the discussion turned to the film adaptation of When Did You Last See Your Father?, starring Jim Broadbent as his father and Colin Firth as himself, Morrison spoke earnestly of how impressed he had been with Broadbent’s portrayal of his Father. Before filming, the two had met and discussed his father at length– his clothes, accent, mannerisms  - and as a result, Morrison thought that Broadbent brought a new understanding to the role that he himself had not fully realised in the book. His parting remark about the film was that now, when he thinks of his father, he sees Broadbent’s face, and finds it difficult to see past that. His only regret is that when he looks in the mirror, he does not similarly see Colin Firth staring back at him.

The evening drew to a close with Morrison speaking briefly of his time working for The Observer, where a passage from When Did You Last See Your Father? appeared, alongside a photograph of the two of them. Seeing his work there, he remarked, proved to be shocking, as he often felt possessive over the story. By the time the film adaptation appeared fourteen years later, he had accepted how he could, and would, share the story with the public. A final round of questions concluded with “can you imagine your own children writing about you in a similar fashion to how you wrote about your parents?”, to which he answered, with an astonishing truth, “when writing about real life, and people in your real life, you have to be careful. But I’d hope they’d cast me in a good light – the truth is important, after all.”