Session number 3, 26/10/2022

Posted on: 31 January 2023 by Saul Leslie in Creative Writing group

The buzzwords for today’s session were that age-old combination: ‘medicalese’ and ‘chocolate’...

Alex Carabine began with a reading of the first section – an epigraph – from her novel. Set in an unspecified North-western city during the Victorian era, with ‘gasping chimneys’ on rooftops were an indication of an industrial cityscape using the imagery of the body. But beneath the brick and slate and grim is a hidden tangle of roots and greenery that predates any manmade intervention. Carabine’s text picked at the cobbles and wafted away the city smoke, to reveal a palimpsest of mulch, vegetation, and soil.

Sammy Ali, our medic student in residence, presented the first act of a musical based on the story around the story of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Dark in tone, but light in its musical accompaniment – a waltz – Act One of “Come with Me” is an origin story of how Wonka established something of a work camp in his Chocolate Factory. Other members of the CW group took part in a live reading of the scripts which Ali provided and circulated. Beyond the recorded song that was the backing to Ali and the other Players’ dramatic reading, chocolate is in the literary air. Jonathan Coe’s forthcoming novel is partially set around the backdrop of the “Chocolate Wars” of the 1990s, and Bernadette pointed out that she’d just come back from a family trip to the Cadbury’s World near Birmingham. Ali is working with the Everyman on this project and we anticipate that we’ve not read or heard the last of his innovative revision of Roald Dahl’s classic.

I read a chapter from a short story called The House of Tolerance. This was a redraft of a passage he developed with feedback provided to him during the first CW+J session back in the summer. The story focuses on the life of the young woman to whom Vincent van Gogh gave his severed ear. It is a historical account of her life before this pivotal moment. A generous bit of feedback recommended that I read up on Van Gogh’s relationship with artist Paul Gaugin. He looms large, though at the edges of the story’s frame, insofar as the history books often cite an argument between Gaugin and Van Gogh as the catalyst that led the Dutchman to take a scalpel to his ear.

David Tierney distributed copies of his short, dystopian Other World/SF story, in which a pair of explorers come across a genderless, curious animal, part goat, part cat. References in the text to two famous artworks, one a painting of a man with a horse PFERD, and the other an installation by Damien Hirst. This led in the feedback to questions about what kinds of cultural artefacts would remain and become significant if a population left earth to inhabit another planet. Particularly impressive was Tierney’s capacity to drop the narrator into the story, much like the explorers in the wilderness, and allow us to forage for narrative clues and make storied kindling.

Paddy Brennan read an exquisitely rendered short story about a breakup in a café, proving that the simplest of conceits can be the most effective, particularly when handled with such care and attention to detail. The narrator’s brittle timbre is precise and frenetic, and Paddy portrayed the inner most thoughts, anticipatory and wholly narcissistic as they are, of the narrator whilst also pointing towards the reality of the situation which the self-consumed narrator fails to notice. This Grand Canyon-sized gap contained within the small space of a crack in a café teacup, between the reality of a situation, and one person’s perception of that situation, was very well-rendered.

Natalie Wall concluded this session with a recital of a poem set in a dentist’s waiting room, which left all those in attendance very aware of our teeth and gums. Natalie’s poem was very affecting, though she looked for some feedback on how to end it. Some alternatives were offered up, about how to leave the poem in that midpoint between decisions, with the narrator in the waiting room perhaps on the cusp of being called to the dentist’s chair.

The session was followed by a decamp to a local jazz evening at Frederik’s on Hope Street. It happened to be my birthday, and Marta had kindly brought along a delicious chocolate cake, which we shared out. Thus, Natalie’s sweet tooth of a poem became all the more present again.

Recurring themes/motifs throughout the session: the railway, medicalese, references to bodies, ‘chocolate’, metaphors of medical tools, the history of vaccinations, tooth decay.