Session number 13, 12/03/2024

Posted on: 12 March 2024 by Richard Snowden-Leak in Creative Writing group

Winter always has its way with time, doesn’t it? Even as the new year stretches its legs and arms with a great, renewing yawn, the greyscape of that cloudy, January sky persists deep into February. That, however, did not stop us from meeting in the Belvedere to help usher in the new year with poetry, drinks, and a continual predilection for birds and their loftiness in our fiction! We had a larger group, this time, with a few new additions—and some new voices.

Starting us off, Saul Leslie began his witty descent into the mundanities of working retail. His nameless narrator guided us through the banal inferno of an MA student’s life bisected by his duties as a worker in a supermarket and his love of literature, often drawing on and providing delightful criticisms of the 2010s that any veteran of that era would appreciate. Through deliberate evocations of Jeremy Kyle and the increasing panopticism of his show (the televisual eye of his jackal-like gaze), ever the pretender to the throne of a (misinformed) ethics, Saul painted a world still in the comedown of a brutal, crude, and awful 2000s that would openly prey on the vulnerable and the poor through mainstream media. (At least now some outlets have the decency to pretend they care!) As ever, the narrator managed to make us laugh with some great observations through electric and engaging character work that might put Kafka to shame.

Marta Zanucco then debuted some of her poetry for the first time with the group. The piece was striking from the very first lines, with strong imagery arresting the reader and keeping them as bound to the page as the speaker seemed to feel in the poetry. A kind of Russian Doll structure pervaded the piece, with lines leading to a more interior dimension of the speaker as the poem proceeded – with an interesting use of stanza placement, an em-dash splitting the piece asunder (that Marta insisted she hadn’t meant in her modesty!). We couldn’t compliment the piece enough for its use of strong verbs, moving imagery, and disquieting yet important themes – and we left the evening hoping that Marta would arrive with more poetry to show us in future, especially given this was the first time she had done so.

Juan opened up with a piece he’d been tasked to write in a self-reflective fashion. He used a kind of omniscient, omnipresent prose so beloved of that third-person placement, flying from the vivacious and lively and connected hometown of his to the ‘loneliness of the cemeteries’, of the ‘19^th century infrastructure’ of England. The piece really knew how to juxtapose imagery to achieve a thematic result, managing to create a bird’s eye critique of postcolonial structures, of an England in the hangover of its empire, a history that owes its lineage to the invasive flights of fancy that took stuffy old Lords and their investments overseas so long ago. We discussed then how we might try to insert a kind of character into this piece, a centrality to the cutting, insightful eye of the prose that Juan si masterfully constructed.

As the session drew to an end, the dark night still overstaying its welcome, we agreed to meet again in the following month with that pre-drink glee that soon, we all knew, the sun would arrive and relieve us of our heavy coats, hats, and gloved hands.