Idle Phononautica

National Flash Fiction Day is Here!

Last year, National Poetry Day came and poets were delighted. One person who wasn’t so happy was Calum Kerr, a writer, editor and self-confessed advocate of the flash fiction form. He sought to change that and thus National Flash Fiction Day was born.

The first ever National Flash Fiction Day falls tomorrow and in the lead-up there have been competitions, readings, flash-mobs and a published collection. All of this culminates in a series of events across the country.

No hard and fast rules have ever been established for writing flash fiction. This has sometimes worked against it, as writers of longer prose often condemn it as writing with no dedication; for readers without patience. However, the flash format with its restricted word count lends itself to some incredibly freeing narratives. To show you just what we mean, we’ve asked a couple of flash fiction authors to submit writing:

To help readers (and writers) out with this previously uncelebrated form, David Gaffney has given The Guardian a list of tips on writing flash fiction.

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M.G. Noakes recycles words for fiction at Fragments/Recycled.

Melanie of TheIncredibleMeeow writes both flash and short fiction.

The National Flash Fiction Day anthology (which has a story from our editor, Nick Murray) is out now and can be found here.

Review: May Day Mayhem

Anya Pearson reviews YARN’s latest literary event, May Mayhem.

The best darn storytelling outfit around, YARN festival’s latest show on May 1st did not disappoint. The event is called ‘The Special Relationship’, but austerity is certainly not the policy of this particular coalition. Overseen by curator-in-chief Gemma Mitchell, generous portions of poetry, miniature plays, film and prose are expertly woven together throughout the night.

With a high turnout for a Tuesday evening, the Book Club is a near-perfect venue. It’s cosy enough to feel intimate but resolutely retains its Shoreditch credentials; a gigantic hole in the partitioning brick wall casually accommodates a would-be sloucher, who puts his feet up to enjoy the show.

In between the performances, Tom Basden’s sparkling compareship keeps our energy levels high – it is May Day, after all. He intersperses the main acts with micro-stories packed with the kind of irony and metaphysical improbability that some will recognise from his two-man comedy show, Freeze, in November 2011.

Anyone who has ever attempted to beat-box in their youth (or, more likely, making a series of syncopated ‘tutting’ noises while covering a friend in flying spittle) will squirm in their seats listening to the tales of Nikesh Shukla. The Generation Vexed author recounts how ‘Pretty Cool’, his teenage rap band, struggled to record a demo tape while his mother’s prayer group gathered in the kitchen below. Punctuated by translated Gujarati-English hybrid conversations with his mother, Shukla’s hilarious story wryly conjures up the awkward escapism of hip-hop fans in suburbia.

Another writer with an anarchic streak, Rich Fulcher gives us a taster from his famous book Tiny Acts of Rebellion. These vindictive yet superbly lame suggestions on how to ‘stick it to the man’ in your daily routine include screaming in a crowded train, refusing to sit in your designated seat on a plane, and in one controversial case, giving a baby the middle finger. Take that, society…

With a diverse, unashamedly literary line-up and needle-sharp wit, YARN has the audience in stitches. Don’t miss the next one.

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See more from the brilliant YARN here: http://bit.ly/KMuACW

Anya Pearson is half of the duo that runs the brilliant inc. magazine. They are launching their next issue with a huge event at The Book Club on May 30th.

Images by Gemma Mitchell.

Review: Mapping Poetry at The Jolly Cricketers

Melanie Gow reviews Mapping Poetry, the latest poetry event from Fast Culture and Claire Trévien.

I spent a gorgeous, gentle evening indulging in a dissimilitude of rhythmical words that wandered a room touching the oddments with a recognition odd things share.
I was at Fast Culture’s Mapping Poetry event organised by Claire Trévien of Sabotage Reviews, in the Jolly Cricketers, Seer Green. A pub that feels like your aunt’s front room, after your cousins have left home. With cricket memorabilia lying happily amongst the unused sterling candelabras and crooked mirrors. Claire, who was wearing a shirt with the globe stretched around it, brought together a diverse and intriguing line up of poets who turned a Monday night into a great start to the week.

Jonathan Steffen, a published poet in numerous publications over the last 30 years, also has short stories, novels, literary translations, songs and instrumental music in his catalogue. Bangkok born Tori Truslow, a bicultural writer of surreal and speculative fiction, fairy tales, travel stories, articles and ‘other oddments’. And, Christine Webb, who made her mark on the poetry scene when she won the annual Poetry London with her poem Seven Weeks.

The whole evening was lovingly thought through, there was a pamphlet designed like a map of the evening, folded into a perfect triangle on parchment, with a sample poem from each poet. Claire Trévien also provided large glass jugs of water, terracotta dishes of nibbles, and a round of poetry bingo with prizes, while Tori had hand drawn a poetry picture puzzle for us all to decipher. All finished off with an open mic. All in all a perfectly pleasant way to spend an evening, the things that stand out are often the oddities.

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Melanie Gow is an editor, a producer and the M.D. of Glow Productions.
Claire Trévien is a poet based in Leamington. Her first collection is published by Salt Publishing and is called Low Tide Lottery.
All photographs by Melanie Gow.

Mapping Poetry

Tomorrow evening sees the launch of Mapping Poetry, an evening of performed poetry devised by Claire Trévien. As the title suggests, the themes of the evening are maps, location and place.

When Claire invited us to put together a printed piece for the event our creative ears pricked up and we set to work designing exactly what the event called for; a map.

So, behold, a little glimpse of the Mapping Poetry cartographic pamphlet. Six poets, some of whom will be performing at the event itself, have given work that is displayed over the map and the whole thing folds neatly into a self-contained triangle. As the event in question is tomorrow, we don’t want to give the whole game away just yet, but if you head along, you can pick one up for free. If you can’t make it, we will be releasing the map through the website eventually.

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Mapping Poetry is at 7pm, Monday 30th April, at the Jolly Cricketers, Seer Green, Beaconsfield.

Claire Trévien is a poetic dynamo. Her first collection was published last year, she is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and alongside Odette Toilette, she is organising the Penning Perfumes event (which we have exacted the design and are typesetting the collection for!)

A Conversation with Ben Galley

With two hit novels at the age of 24 and no plans to stop, Ben Galley has proven himself to be a powerhouse of self-publishing talent. We caught up with the man himself to chat about fantasy fiction, the pitfalls of publishing and the merits of map-making.

The beginning

When did you start writing?

I remember making a comic for my mum and dad aged 8. I think it was then that I got the creative bug. I think at 10 I started my first book. Around 15 or 16 I aimed to write and publish my first proper book. The idea was to be the youngest published author ever.
I took a break and went to music college and came back to it after that.

What brought you back to writing?

Well, I was watching Merlin! I had finished at ACM and was playing with a few bands, ready to start on the road to being a professional musician. I was watching Merlin and getting back into writing in my spare time. During one episode I just thought “I’m going to write a book. And it’s going to be better than this!” Not to anger any Merlin fans or anything like that. It was more that, I was getting back into fantasy, which I have always loved since reading Tolkien at such a young age, and having more time to get back to writing. Together with that lightning flash of an idea I had to go for it.

It started as a hobby, but the more I researched publishing, and self publishing especially, the more I found out how easy it was to get your book out to an audience.

What made you choose the route of self publishing?

Once I started the first couple of chapters [of The Written] I realised I wanted to make a go of it. I started thinking about the traditional routes, literary agents and all that, but four or five chapters into writing this book I started coming across all these articles for self publishing. Once I realised it was possible and the various pluses that came with it, it just seemed right. I wouldn’t have to put up with any rejection letters or share 20% with a literary agent. Not that that isn’t a perfectly valid route too. All the things that an agent or an editor would do, I have to do myself.

So, what skills have you had to draw together to make it all happen?

I figured that I knew enough about graphic design and web design, picked up at music college, that I could easily put together my own stuff. I’d learned all that stuff about the music industry, like publicity, marketing, all that, and how different is the book industry? All you need to do is swap the word book for music, music for book. They’re just five years behind. iTunes to iBooks. Mp3s to e-readers.

I don’t think of it as shunning traditional publishing, it’s just a different direction. It made sense.

Emaneska

The Emaneska series. It seems like fantasy fiction is a becoming a real trend at the moment. Did this embrace of fantasy push you towards writing your own? Do you enjoy writing works that aren’t fantasy?

Yeah, I started a sci-fi novel as a bit of a joke in between The Wanted and Pale Kings, called Destiny’s Children. I always start with a working title as it gains a bit of a personality once you give it a name. I started writing sci-fi and really enjoyed it as I’m quite a geek at heart, but I know I’ve commited myself to a series now [Emaneska] so that is taking the front position. A big influence for me is Neil Gaiman, who writes a more contemporary line of fantasy. It’s a direction I’m toying with.

Gaiman often uses the short story form for his work. Are you interested in that as a medium?

I tried writing a few short stories and I have a plan in mind to form a collection, with the working title Demons and Doldrums. Everything from fantasy fiction, sci-fi, mystery. I hope to have it all in there.

 Interesting that you have started with the long form and only after that start to condense it down…

I think it suits fantasy, like Song of Ice and Fire was planned to be nine books. You’ve got Mark Lawrence’s King of Thorns and Prince of Thorns AND the unnamed one –

What’s your take on ‘the trilogy’?

My take on the trilogy, or my take on THE trilogy? As long as you can keep up with the writing I don’t think you upset too many people.

Was Emaneska always going to be a trilogy?

It’s going to be six! It’s three as the Emaneska trilogy and three more in the same world. Quite separate though. It was always going to be three. Maybe it’s the Tolkien influence from when I was a kid. I think I just had too many ideas to put into one book.

Well yes, as readers can see on the website, you’ve got maps, stories, sidelines, all sorts up there. You have entire mythos there. I imagine you can’t put that all into one book!

Yeah, I think it’s a great technique to use a website alongside a book series. A few people are doing it at the moment and it adds so much. I slowly invented a whole world and I had to chart it somewhere. It’s got a whole ice-covered medieval old English vibe to it.

Not to mention the leanings towards Norse and Greek mythology. Where have you centred the mythos of the story?

Nordic mythology has always been one of my favourites. Absolutely crazy stuff happens and it is completely accepted. It happens in Greek mythology, but not in such a brilliant way.

And what about genre?

Someone said to me that a great fantasy novel isn’t actually fantasy. A great novel is rarely just the novel it pretends to be. I think that’s the right idea.

Give me an example of a great novel, something that you think does that perfectly.

American Gods [Gaiman] is that to an extent. You don’t start out thinking it’s going to be a blend of so many mythologies…

It’s a road novel.

Exactly. It really is. I think Clive Cussler has a lot of books that have sci-fi and fantasy elements. When I heard that quote I wanted to make it, instead of just a fantasy novel, a story behind a world. So I came up with the world first and I thought there needed to be mystery and crime elements as well. Some kind of impetus.

It opens up with a crime! It opens up with murder and theft.

Exactly! That brings Farden into the story immediately. The Written are essentially a police force hired out to people, countries and kingdoms to do certain things. It made sense as a way to create a mystery to drive the story.

Self Publishing

Jumping back to self publishing. You’re doing it all yourself, and that is a lot of jobs. How do you manage it all? Let’s start with editing. How do you go about editing your own work?

I set myself very strict deadlines, like I’ll say I have to have a certain amount of chapters written by a certain time. Once that is done I do a similar thing for the editing. I put the writing away for a week to get it out of my head and then come back and go through it with a fine tooth comb. Once I’ve done that I’ll give it to my test readers, whatever you might call them. That’s something I think the self-publishing industry has borrowed from the gaming industry, the idea of releasing something that’s not a finished product. There’s no harm in it. Publishing houses are very secretive. They’ll keep it all very in-house until the last minute whereas in self-publishing it’s different. Reader feedback is so useful.

So you have a small team behind you.

Yes, it started with a couple of friends and has expanded for Pale Kings.

Is it difficult to deconstruct something that you’ve created? Something that’s so close to you.

Absolutely. If I was with a publishing house there would be someone there who would say “no” when things needed changing, but that is why I’m so lucky to have these dedicated friends who will read over these things for me.

Any pitfalls you’ve discovered?

Editing. I rushed The Written and let a few things slip. Since releasing it I have re-edited and rereleased. All the errors have been caught, fingers crossed. I’ve definitely learnt from that and try to ensure a higher level in my work.

Self publishing has this hallmark of being very low quality, both in content and cover.  If you can publish a book online in four minutes and make a quick buck having your mates buy it for 99 cents of Smashwords, people will. But so many who do aren’t giving the attention to quality that literature demands and deserves.

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Ben Galley has written and released two novels, The Written and Pale Kings, which are part of the Emaneska trilogy.
Find out more about his work and the world he has created at his website.
Ben is currently on a tour to launch Pale Kings.

Prose Poetry Vs Poetic Prose

Eleanor Perry delves into that grey space between poetry and prose.

Lately I’ve been thinking about prose poetry. It seems to me that, as a poetic form, it’s characterised by its lack of rules, which makes it both a wonderful and difficult thing to approach as a poet; wonderful because with such an absence of parameters it’s free to be explored without limit, but difficult for precisely the same reason – boundaries can be reassuring guidelines at times, and a navigating a place without them can be a daunting prospect.

Strangely enough, a lot of my recent reads fall into the non-place that is curiously in between poetry and prose, leaning toward one or the other in various degrees. Firstly, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, a book T.S Eliot described as ‘poetic prose’ in his introduction of it, is indeed written in a lyrical style that wanders languidly between story events, but underlying that is a solid narrative framework. It seems to me that, crucially, a coherent narrative could be part of what separates prose poetry from flash fiction.

Secondly I have just finished reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, an ethereal and mellifluous tale of transience and a childhood invaded by vagrancy. In a similar fashion, it is the narrative that anchors the wayward writing firmly to prose rather than poetry, although at times Robinson creates such a sense of the poetic ephemeral that it is easy to see why it sits ambiguously between the two.

And then there is Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, a kaleidoscopic word-tapestry woven with light and sadness, and which would appear to sit quite securely at the prose poetry end of the spectrum, although beneath the surreal is a barely tangible sense of narrative at work. It seems to me that it isn’t as simple as putting pieces of work on a spectrum with poetry at one end and prose at the other. Pinning down what differentiates a prose poem from a piece of poetic prose or a piece of flash fiction is extremely difficult, and I wonder whether it is down to some sort of inherent intention in the writing itself that contributes to its definition of one or the other.

Take, for example Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, a genre-defying collection of comment-card poems that add up to a sort of post-consumerist confessional diary, touching upon the dehumanisation of the customer, the compulsive and self-perpetuating nature of desire and the notions of detachment and anonymity that result from it. These at times seem to be prose poems and at other times something else entirely, borrowing a little from either form and fashion them into something new.

Or how about Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a prose that is constantly shifting in perspective among each of the six characters’ voices and to the voice of the waves themselves and then back again in a pleasantly perplexing stream of consciousness. that has at least as much in common with poetry as with prose — in fact, Woolf herself defined the form she used as a ‘playpoem’. Finally there is Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a febrile and relentless interior monologue accounting the deterioration of a passionate relationship told in a frenzied and tormented prose soliloquy that makes constant use of devices like amplified imagery, repeated motifs and an oblique and disconnected tone that would normally be associated with poetry.

Like the works themselves which dally joyfully between the conventions of one or the other, prose poetry is not so easily categorised as perhaps one might hope. But again, therein lies the magic; a lack of rules means that there are no rules to be broken. Writers looking at exploring prose poetry are free to dance lightly along the spectrum and back again, free to experiment without the fear of being tied down to a particular form. For anyone interested in examining transience or transition, this would appear to be an ideal form to explore.

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Eleanor Perry is a poet and writer based in Folkestone.
Prose Poetry Vs Poetic Prose was originally published on The Music of Breakages (17/02/12)

Meanwhile…

Angry letters from fonts and malaise-filled haiku pepper this issue of meanwhile. Have a gander.

Here’s a letter, a rather strong letter at that, from the font Comic Sans. He’s angry. Like, really pissed.
(written by Mike Lacher via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

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Artist, Meg Hitchcock, has created these collage works by painstakingly cutting letters from various books. An exercise in detail and patience,  these works are striking however you see them.

(via This is Colossal)

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When despair sets in, what do office workers do? That’s right! They write haiku.

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And that’s it.
We hope you all had a relaxing Easter holiday.

http://bit.ly/HrPBmc

Adventures in Form – A Review

Adventures in Form, ed. Tom Chivers
reviewed by Hannah Rosefield

‘I hear ghostly Academics in Limbo screeching about form,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in his notes to the 1959 audio recording of Howl. Lest we doubt that this is a bad thing, he follows up with ‘A word on the Academies: poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made… [and] wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.’

Ginsberg is not alone: many readers and writers of the past hundred years have regarded poetic form as the preserve of academics whose obsession with counting iambs and spotting spondees acts as a barrier to understanding. Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms, Rules and Constraints, beautifully produced by independent publishing house Penned in the Margins,is determined to prove form’s naysayers wrong. Featuring established (and establishment) names such as Ruth Padel and Paul Muldoon, as well as younger, lesser-known poets, it is a splendid demonstration of how the prioritization of form can provide a freedom absent from free verse.

The anthology is divided into fifteen sections of varying length and range. ‘Traditional Revised’ eases the reader in with a series of semi-familiar forms: rejigged sestinas, villanelles and, predominantly, sonnets – though most of these last move so far from identifiable sonnet forms that one wonders whether form can still be said to be their guiding principle. Of particular note are Colette Bryce’s wistful “Once”, a ‘skinny villanelle’ pondering the limits of reuse, and Sophie Mayer’s “A Volta for the Sonnet as a Drag Queen”, which reimagines the sonnet as a drag artist in ‘Lamé, lurex, tits/ aglitter’.

Elsewhere modernity, not tradition, is the prevailing spirit. The section ‘Txts, Tweets and Status Updates’ explores the areas of social media where poetry and mundanity overlap, while Iain Sinclair collects newspaper headlines in “Signs & Shivers” and Sam Riviere enacts the current arts cuts on his own writing in his “Austerities” sequence.

Adventures in Form could not exist without Oulipo, the French experimentalist group founded in 1960, whose members write according to random and elaborate constraints. One such Oulipian form is n+7, in which the writer replaces every noun in an original text with the seventh noun after it in the dictionary. In Ross Sutherland’s Oulipo-inspired reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, n+7 becomes n+23 and the fairy tale’s heroine becomes The Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-Ha. More vividly than any other, Sutherland’s poem dramatizes the collision of the familiar and the strange that is one of literature’s primary functions, as Tom Chivers notes in his introduction.

Penned in the Margins is a ‘live literature producer’ as well as a publishing house, and many of the poems in Adventures in Form demand to be read aloud, their heavy use of sound clusters creating an aural storm which reminds us that poetry exists in time as well as on the page. In Patience Agbabi’s contribution, “From Africa Singing”, she asks ‘How many/ poets think “little song” when they think “sonnet”?’ Adventures in Form offers an encouraging answer to this question: above all, it is an exploration of the ways in which form makes poetry sing.

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Hannah Rosefield is a writer residing in London. We highly recommend you read her piece Galanthus over at The Junket.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publishing house and live literature producer, generating some of the most innovative poetry publications around.
Their next event is on Thursday 19th April launching The Bells of Hope, a new collection by Roddy Lumsden.