Little Shop of Horrors 31 October 2011

Little Shop of Horrors takes place on Monday 31^st October, promising a night of spooky tales read by both established and emerging writers and storytellers. The event will be hosted by Steve Rapaport, proprietor of new genre bookshop Pulp Fiction.

Readers will be performing scary stories or poems, either their own works or their favourites. The audience can purchase tea, coffee and Hallowe’en-themed cake, and are welcome to bring a bottle of wine (corkage is £1).

Title of event: Little Shop of Horrors

Venue: Pulp Fiction, EH3 9AH

Price: FREE to attend, BYOB corkage £1

Booking info: No tickets required

Time: 20:00 – 23:00

 

 

The Scottish Storytelling Festival this week

By Marie Montondo

In world where high-tech entertainment is the norm, some think that oral storytelling is a mostly extinct art form, outdated and irrelevant in this day and age. A trip to The Scottish Storytelling Centre’s Storytelling Festival, however, might prove that this is anything but true.

This year marks the Centre’s 22^nd annual Storytelling festival, with 45 events throughout the city of Edinburgh, and more across Scotland.  Until October 29, local and international artists gather to share and exchange stories, of personal and cultural significance.

“Storytelling is an important part of the heritage of the nation,” said Tom Muir, one of over 45 storytellers performing in the festival.  Tom, an Orkney native who tells stories of the Northern Isles, explained that storytelling allows people to see little cultural differences even in geographically small areas.

“The same story will vary from place to place in the islands and will change from family to family, from individual to individual,” he said, explaining that oral stories take on personal significance that books and films lack.  Tom’s stories have changed throughout his life to reflect his experiences. “You make it your own, and it becomes your story that you’re telling.”

The stories told at this year’s festival are built around an Island theme. Incorporating tales from both Scottish and Mediterranean Islands, festival organizers say that participants will be able to both celebrate local heritage and experience new cultures.  Furthermore, by pairing stories from Scottish Islands with those from the Mediterranean, the Centre hopes to demonstrate connections between apparently distinct countries.

“When you look through the history and folklore of Scotland and the Mediterranean a lot of them are very similar,” said Lindsay Corr, the Centre’s marketing director.  She explained that many of the Scottish and Mediterranean folktales even share the same characters:” It proves that across the world the stories go so far back and they are all interlinked.”

A central component of the festival is the performance of the Odyssey, the epic poem about the ancient Greek hero, Odysseus.  Starting on Monday, part of the poem will be told each night by a different person, until two final events on 29 October, when several musicians and performers will come together to tell the full story.

““It’s allowed us to bring storytelling to a large stage and really showcase that this can be just as entertaining as the other art forms out there, and that it can be put on a large scale,” says Lindsay.

To increase the scale of this year’s events the Centre has chosen to feature musicians and dancers from outside Scotland for the first time. According to Lindsay, the inclusion of these performances will hark back to days when music, dance and storytelling went “hand in hand,” as a way for societies to pass information from one generation to the next.

As well as offering storytelling performances, the Centre hopes to promote storytelling in the general public by holding “Tell-A-Story Day” on October 28.  This outreach programme encourages organizations across the UK to host storytelling events of their own- so far, over 100 events have been planned.  The Centre facilitates these events providing guides for planning and promotion, and offers to register them on their website.  The goal of these small storytelling events is to strengthen local communities and create a sense of shared identity between people.

The festival also includes a number of training events for people who want to learn more about the skills behind storytelling.  According to the Centre, storytelling is a useful skill for people in all careers, and the workshops’ relaxed, informal style allows even those who may be apprehensive to benefit.  With typically group sizes ranging from 10-20, Lindsay said:- “it’s a nice size where you don’t feel singled out, but it’s small enough so you can ask all the questions that you want.”

With training, storytelling, music, and dance events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and on 14 Scottish Isles, this year marks the most ambitious Storytelling Festival the Centre has seen.  They hope to attract over 20,000 audience members, with a good amount of attendance in locations as remote as Mull and the Fair Isle.

The Festival is on now until October 30.  Tickets are on sale from the Scottish Storytelling Centre Box Office at 43-45 High Street.  For the full programme, visit the website.

Book Talk – an online book club

Scottish Book Trust has launched an exciting new venture designed to get book lovers from all over Scotland talking about their favourite topic.

Book Talk is an online community that allows people who love books to enjoy all the benefits of a book club from the comfort of their own sitting room. Busy Scots who like to read can log on anytime to discover new books, listen to lively podcast discussions, read in-depth interviews with authors, browse reviews and, most importantly, join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter.

Book clubs can also get involved by reading the book of the month at their group, applying to be Book Talk’s Book Club of the Month and submitting reviews. There will also be handy hints and tips for people who are keen to start a book club in their own area.

Book Talk will feature books from a broad range of genres, from both new and established authors, with a particular focus on books by writers based in Scotland.

Marc Lambert, CEO of Scottish Book Trust, said:

“The spectacular rise of social networks over the past few years has provided people from all walks of life with an instant platform for their opinions, and instant access to scores of like-minded individuals. This has led to an explosion of conversation between people who otherwise would never have met. We are keen for Book Talk to become a hub for the online book conversations that are happening across Scotland, to stimulate discussion, generate enthusiasm and engage a community of book lovers.”

Anyone can sign up to Book Talk free of charge at http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/booktalk. You can also keep up with the latest Book Talk on twitter @Booktalk_SBT or by using the hashtag #Booktalk. You can also follow them on Facebook, by searching for Book Talk.

The first book to be discussed was The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai, a tale woven around the theme of the stories we tell each other, and ourselves. Lucy is a small-town librarian who ‘borrows’ a child and takes him on a road trip, ostensibly to rescue him from the weekly ‘anti-gay’ classes that his Fundamentalist Christian parents are keen for him to attend.  As a librarian, Lucy is someone who has chosen to live her life among books, and she sees everything she experiences through a narrative lens. Published in June 2011 to rave reviews, this is Makkai’s first novel, and the issues raised in the book should ensure a lively discussion amongst Book Talk members.

A podcast discussion based around The Borrower, featuring journalist Pauline McLean and librarian Rachel McCabe, can be found here.

The next book to be discussed is Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela and the podcast about that book will be available on 7 November.

 

British mountaineer Andy Kirkpatrick comes to Edinburgh

 

Straight from his latest epic on Norway’s Troll Wall, Andy sets out on fourth speaking tour which will include a date in Edinburgh.

 

British mountaineer Andy Kirkpatrick has a reputation for being extreme.  He has a compulsive obsession with climbing the most difficult winter routes he can find, often completely alone.  Described by Climbing magazine as having “a strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult”, he is one of the world’s most driven and accomplished mountaineers.

 

 

 

In the last 5 years Andy has also carved himself a niche as the UK’s only “stand-up” mountaineer, funding his dangerous trips through his outrageously funny theatre shows (Psychovertical, When Hell Freezes Over, Off the Wall) recounting his extreme adventures with a heady mix of observational comedy and self-deprecating tales of survival.

 

 

Fresh from climbing the tallest vertical rock-face in Europe, The Troll Wall in Norway, Andy will be touring the UK this autumn talking about his new book, Cold Wars.  A follow up to his award-winning Psychovertical, the book charts a period of his career marked by his increasingly high-risk climbs.  As his brother is drawn into the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Andy juggles family life with his climbing obsession, completing two of the most dangerous climbs on the planet – a 15-day winter ascent of the Dru in the Alps and the first winter ascent of the East face of Mermoz in Patagonia.

 

A gripping account of modern adventure from the UK’s most extreme mountaineer.

Troll Wall from Andy Kirkpatrick on Vimeo.

Monday 7 November EDINBURGH Cameo Cinema

 

 

West Port Book Festival – You have been bugged…

by Sonja Bettina Klein

 

Everyone has been on a bus at least once in their lives wondering what the person sitting behind was talking about on the phone. It is in the inquisitive nature of human beings to need to know. But what do you do when you can’t find out what the story behind the fragments of the conversation is? You become a writer, and write a story about it.

“bugged” is a collaboration work of many authors that took part in a national experiment of turning eavesdropping into a story. On Saturday, some of these stories were presented at the West Port Book Festival in Peter Bell Books.  “What have they been talking about?” was the main idea of the experiment which was used to spark the creativity of writers. Jo Bell, one of the instigators of the experiment and the book, led the hour of short stories and poems.

Famous poets such as Rob A. Mackenzie, Helen Addy and Lynsey May took the audience on to a journey through different writing styles and stories. Who would have thought that a simple sentence as “Got a pen, Bob?” could turn into a story that catches hold of the audience.

Although the ambulance outside on West Port and the cars passing by sometimes interupted the presentation, the audience listened with rapt attention to the various readers.

One or two people in the audience took out their notebooks and scribbled down words while the poets read, and the idea of writing a story out of a single overheard sentence or communication seemed to interest everyone.

“Following the 1st of July 2010, the writers had 6 weeks to send in their stories and we had 6 weeks to get it published.”, says Bell. “It was a challenge, especially as I’m a poet and this story really required to be prose.”

“Many writers told us they don’t know what to write about. But we even had to turn down some stories in the end, and when I went online later to read up about these people I saw that we had turned down some of Britain’s best authors.”

“But we also wanted to give some writers a chance that hadn’t been published yet.”

Many of the stories were captured from everyday conversations, overheard in a café in Edinburgh itself, a statement turned into Chinese whisper and many more, often with a serious background.

The hour of prose and poetry left the audience feeling slightly poetic, too. As Jo Bell commented:- “The streets are heaving with raw material for writers”.

West Port Book Festival

by Sonja Bettina Klein

“What are you all doing here?” was the question Stuart Campbell posed at the beginning of his reading at the West Port Book Festival today. Within seconds he had the audience on his side, with his jokes and self-deprecation.

Stuart Campbell is the author of the book Boswell’s Bus Pass that tells of Campbell’s tour following Dr Johnson’s and Boswell’s journey 238 years ago. Together with a group of, as he explained, “equally eccentric and badly behaved companions” Campbell encountered odd guest book entries and stories that you can only experience on this type of journey.

“Clearly, Scotland is an army of eccentrics,” Campbell said, and listening to his work, this seemed to be only too true. The audience laughed, having been prepared for a report of an unusual journey. What came was a reading of extracts of a book that made the audience laugh nearly non-stop.

 Although the audience was mainly comprised of the more mature reader, Campbell fascinated all of them, and most bought the book at the end of the reading.

West Port Book Festival – Luke Williams & William Letford

by Sonja Bettina Klein

Book festivals are about books and poems, obviously. But they are also about the people who write and tell the stories and poems. Yesterday at the West Port Book Festival, Luke Williams read from his first and very new novel, The Echo Chamber, and William Letford recited some of his award-winning poems.

Cramped into a small second hand bookshop in West Port, surrounded by old books and the smell of literature, about twenty people from young to old allowed themselves to be carried away.

Luke Williams who began his career studying history at Edinburgh University did not simply read from his book, he drew the listener into the story – a story about a middle-aged woman called Evie Steppman who grew up in Lagos in the 1950s and had extraordinarily acute powers of hearing. She spends most of her time alone in an attic in Scotland and when starting to lose her hearing abilities, decides to write down her memories.

“She is quite a freak.”, said Williams about his character. “I used a rather unusual style of writing because I tried to put a talk to paper the way it reaches the ears.”

“I also decided to place the story in a different country because I think every writer needs a bit of distance to the story and I needed quite a bit more. So I picked a country I have never been to and that is far away.”

Open to all sorts of questions, William soon tells the listeners how he got the story idea that was partially inspired by history as well.

“As you can see my ears are sticking out quite a bit. When I was a kid and got teased about it, at night I used to think I had these amazing powers of hearing everything because of my ears.”

It was Williams’ humour and self-honesty that made the audience laugh and be swept away by the story. There is no face in the room that is bored or not hanging on to his every word.

And so after that it was the perfect moment for William Letford to begin reciting his poems. Letford received the New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2008 for his work. He talked freely with a light smile throughout the whole performance. With his Scottish accent, the up and down intonations of his voice coupled with his humour, the audience did not have any option but to listen and laugh. Ranging from more serious topics to romantic and unusual descriptions of making love he covered a wide range of emotions.

“In winter, I fight 50 battles from the duvet to the front door – and win.”, he says in one of his poems and it is not hard to imagine him in the morning on a cold winter day, knowing he will have to go outside for the day.

At the end of the event, the applause did not easily stop and most of us could have listened longer to Letford and Williams. But then the audience is best left wanting more surely?

If you would like to hear the Luke Williams’ reading or William Letford’s recital, then go to the West Port Book Festival website   but I also conducted a couple of short interviews with both Williams and Letford:-

Audio – Interview with Peggy Hughes of West Port Book Festival

The West Port Book Festival is running for the fourth year this weekend until Sunday 16 October 2011. The programme runs all afternoon and into the evening. Tickets can be obtained from Peter Bell Books.

The young and enthusiastic team has put together a diverse programme with talks by poets and writers, book binders allowing an insight into their work, dance lessons and much more.

Sonja Klein, a journalism student from Edinburgh Napier University, spoke with Peggy Hughes, the programme director, about the idea behind the festival and what there is to see and hear this weekend:-

 

Edinburgh schoolgirl wins Young Writers Award 2011

An Edinburgh schoolgirl has come one step closer to her dream of becoming the Next Big Thing in Scottish writing, after being named as the winner of a Scottish Book Trust Young Writers Award.

Chloe Paton (14), from James Gillespies High School in Edinburgh, is one of three lucky Scottish teenagers selected to receive the award. Her submission to the competition, entitled The Man with the Rucksack, was chosen from over 115 entries as an outstanding example of teenage creative writing.

Commenting on her win, Chloe said:

“I’m so excited to have been given this opportunity. To be able to meet and work with a successful, published author is one of the best things that has happened to me. I can’t wait to get started!”

Chloe’s money-can’t-buy prize will ensure that she gets the best possible start for her writing career. She will spend a 6 month mentoring period with published teen writer and playwright Cathy Forde, enjoy a visit to a top London publisher and get the chance to meet industry professionals.

Caitrin Armstrong, Writer Development Manager at Scottish Book Trust, said:

“The standard of applications for this year’s Young Writers Awards was extremely high. Chloe’s entry stood out as a very strong piece of writing and I look forward to seeing how her writing develops as the mentoring progresses.”

This year’s mentor is Cathy Forde, the best-selling author of Sugarcoated, Bad Wedding and Fifteen Minute Bob. Cathy said:

“It is a privilege to work with emerging talent in the raw and to have the luxury of time to nurture and develop that talent in an atmosphere of creativity and enthusiasm.”

Chloe’s winning entry is available to read here.

 

The West Port Book Festival – Emily Dodd

Emily Dodd is an Edinburgh poet and published author who is quietly gaining an appreciative following in the capital and beyond. She is appearing on Thursday 13 October 2011 at The West Port Book Festival and she is introduced by The West Port Book Festival programme to her slot at Edinburgh Books in this way:-

8.30PM Emily Dodd

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