The Glue Factory online gatherings will come to an end in a month's time, on Sunday December 11th. This, the third iteration of a series that began with A Leap in the Dark during the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, will be the last, and it really is the end. No more after this.
The newsletter will continue until the following Sunday (18th), and there will be a performance by the Carthorse Orchestra Players after Christmas, details of which will follow.
For reasons that won't surprise you I'm moving away from Twitter and, since I have only ever promoted The Glue Factory through that particular platform, this seems to me to be excellent timing. With a book to edit, another to complete and submit and many other commitments, I'll need all the time I can get in 2023 and beyond.
I've set up a Mastodon account and, at the time of writing, have around 30 followers More would be very welcome, and if you're on the mailing list for this newsletter I hope you'll be among them.
You can follow me here: https://mastodon.social/invite/QtBRrwfa
I'll continue to use Twitter for the time being, to share newsletter links and to promote The Glue Factory until the gatherings end, but I may shut down my account before then if the site becomes unendurable.
Mastodon is not quite as user-friendly as Twitter, at least not for this newcomer, but - how best to put this? - there's a room in the elephant.
Newsletter contents
1. Aid for Ukraine
2. This week’s online gathering
3. Indie press news
Confingo
Fitzcarraldo and the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize
4. Street Writing Woman: A Tribute to Laura Del-Rivo
5. Lost in the Willows - tonight!
6. Ghost Stories for Christmas
7. QUEER anthology (2nd edition)
8. MA/MFA in Creative Writing at City University
9. This week's Wendy Erskine news
10. Close readings of The Waste Land
11. Shocking filler 🧦🧦🧦
12. Next week's online gathering
13. Nudge
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1. Aid for Ukraine
It's not over yet. The most far-reaching aid programme has been, and remains, the British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal. You can donate quickly and easily here.
Please donate whatever you can, whenever you can.
And you might like to buy a copy of a new anthology compiled by Neill McGuirk and Michael Murphy in which nearly 300 artists, writers and musicians discuss the records that influenced them, including our very own Rónán Hession on Billy Bragg. All proceeds go to Red Cross Ukraine. Good work!
There's a full list of contributors (very impressive!), and you can pre-order here.
Thank you.
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2. This week’s online gathering
We welcome back Vik Shirley and her guests for an evening dedicated to horror and the grotesque. Vik will be reading from her new collection Corpses and from Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse.
Nicky Melville will perform poems responding to films such as Salem’s Lot and Scanners and The Dead Don’t Die.
Steven Fowler offers responses to horror films including The Silence of the Lambs and An American Werewolf in London
Madelaine Culver will read ‘found’ poems using text from reviews of Under the Skin and share some thoughts on women in horror
David Spittle will discuss Italian horror and the genre knonw as ‘Giallo’
And I'll talk about Alfred Hitchcock's bizarre and undervalued masterpiece The Trouble with Harry: a light romantic comedy ... about a corpse.
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Chair of judges, Tim Parnell, said: ‘By turns, funny, moving, and angry, Diego Garcia is as compelling to read as it is intricately wrought. For Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams collaboration is both method and politics. Against the dogmatism of the single-voiced fiction that informed the British government’s expulsion of the Chagossian people from their homeland, they respond not only with rigorous critique, but also with an understanding of the relationship between voice and power which shapes the very form of Diego Garcia. A marvellous book which extends the scope of the novel form.’
Ali Smith, one of this year’s judges and the winner of the prize in 2014, said that at the novel’s heart ‘is an experiment with form that asks what fiction is, what art is for, and how, against the odds, to make visible, questionable and communal the structures, personal and political, of contemporary society, philosophy, lived history’.
Writing in the New Statesman, fellow judge Tom Gatti added: ‘Despite its singular and unrepeatable form, Diego Garcia is not a closed book. At every juncture connections are drawn and doors flung open. Political narratives are questioned, social structures reimagined and, in this exhilarating, generous novel, the act of storytelling is made new.’
The 2022 Goldsmiths Prize judging panel consisted of Ali Smith, Natasha Brown (author of Assembly, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2021), Tom Gatti (executive editor, culture, at the New Statesman) and chair of judges Tim Parnell (director of the Goldsmiths Prize and senior lecturer in English at Goldsmiths).
The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in association with the New Statesman in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the spirit of creative daring associated with Goldsmiths as a university, and to reward fiction that breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form. Previous winners include Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, Nicola Barker, Lucy Ellmann and M. John Harrison.
Plus
introductory talk and Q&A with special guests, and the chance to buy Laura’s novels from Holland Park Press and Five Leaves Press
Sunday 27 November 2pm-4.30pm
A true writer of the streets, Laura Del-Rivo (1934-2022) was known to most of her friends around Portobello Road as ‘the tights lady’ – a market stall purveyor of the finest, most eye-catching hosiery in West London. Though her ever-stylish appearance held clues, few people realised she had led a literary double life.
That, back in 1961, the publication of her debut novel The Furnished Room marked the debut of Britain’s first female beatnik author – a young, convent-educated woman who had escaped from the stockbroker belt in Surrey to pitch up at 24 Chepstow Villas W11 – where she lived alongside budding actors, fighting artists and original Angry Young Man, Colin Wilson.
The book – an epochal evocation of existentialist rebels, art students, conmen and petty crooks mixing it up at bottle parties in a Rachmanesque Ladbroke Grove – had scarcely hit the shelves before it was optioned by ambitious local film director Michael Winner, who turned it into his first major feature in 1963.
As a tribute to Laura, who sadly packed up her barrow and left her furnished room for the last time on 30 March 2022, her family and friends invite you to join us for a screening of West 11 and a celebration of her life at the epicentre of Portobello Road, the Electric Cinema, on 27 November 2022 at 2pm.
As well as the chance to see Winner’s film on the big screen, there will be talks and a Q&A featuring special guests, author and Colin Wilson archivist Colin Stanley and local writer Cathi Unsworth. There will also be the chance to furnish your own room with Laura’s books from Holland Park Press and Five Leaves Press, including rare editions of her ’80s Grove classic Speedy and Queen Kong.
Tickets are £15, available from www.electriccinema.co.uk/film/
More on Laura: www.lauradelrivo.com
www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/
www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/
www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/
www.3ammagazine.com/3am/laura-
www.londonfictions.com/laura-
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Loss and loneliness stalked Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows. This play is a poignant, moving and often funny examination of the life and relationships of this beloved children's author.
Lost in the Willows is the second collaboration between the director Margot Jobbins and playwright Christine Foster. Starring with Robert are Neil James (God of Carnage), Abi McLoughlin (Confessional) and Laura Fausner (The Railway Children)
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Fun facts: not only was this anthology launched at our online gathering Carthorse Orchestra last year, but its editor Frank Wynne was the very first guest on the very first online event, A Leap in the Dark, back in March 2020, when he talked about his translation of Animalia, the French novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo which won the Republic of Consciousness prize that year.
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