City of Culture?

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You may have heard that Stoke is bidding to be the next ‘UK City of Culture’ (2021).  This accolade brings to the title-holder economic benefits of millions according to the 2014 Government consultation paper and has previously been bestowed on areas commonly considered cultural backwaters (Derry 2013, Hull 2017).  The very idea has met with derision in some quarters, but Stoke is in with a chance on two counts – it fulfils the implicit criteria of economic depression and social deprivation, as well as the stated requirement for ‘a high quality cultural programme that builds and expands on local strengths and reaches a wide variety of audiences, creating a demonstrable economic impact and a catalyst for regeneration as well as contributing to community cohesion and health and wellbeing’.  In recent years community-directed arts programmes such as Appetite, B-Arts and Live Age have burgeoned.  Stoke also hosts the very well regarded British Ceramics Biennial and now has its own ‘Hot Air’ Literary Festival.

There is a small but distinctive literary heritage, for those who care to look.  Stoke’s best-known literary son, Arnold Bennett, realised quite early in his career the potential of the Potteries for artistic representation and attempted to awaken his audience to the grimy glories of the industrial landscape:

They are mean and forbidding of aspect – sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country …. Yet be it said that romance is even here – the romance which, for those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells amid the seats of industrial manufacture, softening the coarseness, transfiguring the squalor, of these mighty alchemic operations. Look down into the valley from this terrace-height where love is kindling, embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre in a glance, and it may be that you will suddenly comprehend the secret and superb significance of the vast Doing which goes forward below.

Today award-winning, Stoke-born author, Lisa Blower, nods to Bennett in her forthcoming novel Sitting Ducks, a story set squarely in post-industrial Stoke: http://fairacrepress.co.uk/shop/sitting-ducks/.  Watch this space.

Lost and Found (II) – Arthur Berry

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On Wednesday 16th December, Ray Johnson led a cast of actors at the Stoke Film Theatre in a reading of a previously unpublished play by Arthur Berry “Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt”. This drama, edited by Deborah McAndrew for the occasion, concerns the trials and tribulations of a local working-class girl who yearns for something beyond the confines of her class and sex. Discontent has prompted Phoebe to take employment as a showman’s assistant and to string along two lovers (the dull but faithful childhood sweetheart and a more exciting married man – the local butcher). Incorporated in this sometimes farcical tragi-comedy is a tale of incest worthy of the ancient Greeks (Berry typically winks towards the classical while taking his own demotic road). In the end Phoebe’s attempts to traduce her fate are apparently in vain as she suffers the consequence of playing the field and gets up the spout. Though not all the actors quite mastered the Potteries accent – a difficult one – they overcame the issue of staging (or lack of it). A row of seated speakers in mufti is not promising; in fact full advantage was taken of the limited movement the arrangement allowed to realise a dynamic comic performance made easier, no doubt, by Berry’s earthy lyricism.

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“Stoke Moon” (1994) by Arthur Berry

The next evening “Jazz, Beer and Oatcakes” was on at the Potteries Museum in Hanley. This was again led by Ray Johnson and inspired by another ‘lost’ recording of Arthur Berry by Arthur Wood: “Obsessed by Oatcakes” (Radio Stoke, 1978). Oatcakes were indeed consumed, though the inevitable salad garnish was not, I would venture, quite in the spirit of a man so enamoured of stodge. Clips of Berry’s peerless voice were interspersed with film clips, readings and songs from jazz ensemble Fine and Dandy. A certain amount of audience participation was the order of the day and the pre-Christmas crowd quite willingly raised voices and glasses to the not-too-difficult refrain “Oatcakes! Oatcakes!” It was a jolly evening, another event to accompany the successful exhibition: “Lowry and Berry: Observers of Modern Life” – now extended until January 17th!

Godot at the New Vic

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There are many myths surrounding Samuel Beckett and his work. He is famously reported as telling a reporter that if knew what a play had meant, he would have put it in the play. A theatre critic also described Godot as a play in which nothing happens. Twice. His is an enigmatic presence in 20th century theatre; just google a picture of him and you’ll see what I mean – what a face!

You can see what the critic meant. Vladimir and Estragon are two tramps who meet by a tree for two days running to wait for the mysterious Godot. Each day a message is brought by a boy to say that Godot can’t come today, but he is sure to come tomorrow. A conceited land-owner, Pozzi, and his slave, Lucky (a slave called Lucky?), also cross the stage in each half. Beckett plays with our expectations of time and chronology (everything happens twice, challenging us to examine the notion of causality in narrative development), plot, character, and even what it means to be an audience (there are a number of meta-theatrical moments when the central characters gaze in to the crowd and question who we are – as we question who they are). The play is at once a slapstick exchange between two tramps about sore feet and boots, and an existential meditation on life, death and the possibility of being rescued from the insignificance of life by a greater power.

London Classic Theatre’s production is a fantastic interpretation of a play which has changed the way we think about theatre.

Lost Shelley Poem Found

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A long lost Shelley poem has resurfaced this year, and has now been acquired by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The actress Vanessa Redgrave read  a very moving excerpt from it on R4’sToday progamme, and the librarian was interviewed…
The story is that Shelley got kicked out of Oxford because he published a tract advocating atheism and this poem, called ‘The Existing State of Things’, an anti-war poem. All copies were destroyed, but Shelley managed to keep one which he sent to a relative in Italy, where it remained stashed away ever since.
Below the link:
Check it out. It chimes with the situation as it still is….
Martin J

Norther Broadsides’ The Winter’s Tale

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Staff and students were at the New Vic to see Northern Broadsides interpretation of The Winter’s Tale. It was, as ever, a seductive experience of precision acting and innovative staging. It would be unfair to single out one performance from a faultless cast, but I’m going to anyway. Conrad Nelson as the king, Leontes, was magnificent in his brooding, introspective delusion. I’m sure he’s a lovely guy in real life, but he plays a baddie very well (his Iago, played opposite Lennie Henry’s Othello, was a study in malevolence). The rest of the cast were just magnificent.
Broadsides are well known for mixing drama and music in inventive ways and the turn from tragedy to romance, the ‘problem’ of this problem play, signaled the setting of Shakespeare’s verse to many musical genres, including Bob Dylan, and a folk/hippy design. There can’t been many interpretations of Shakespeare which include Irish dancing, but there should be.
We all departed stage left, pursued by a bear. Next stop Godot!
Broadsides’ trailer for the production can be found here

Trip to Grasmere English and Creative Writing 31 October/1 November 2015, Melanie, Lisa, Martin

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Repeating last year’s rapturous experience of our Level 4 English and Creative Writing residential trip to Grasmere, Lake District, everybody again had a blistering good time. On this occasion, we filled up some of the vacant spaces with level 5 and 6 people, and there was even a stray post-grad MA student… The mix of levels turned out to be a benevolent thing: we intellectually and otherwise cross-fertilised covering the range. Once again, the atmosphere was distinctly Halloweeny, what with the trip dates actually coinciding with the very event itself, and the local Youth Hostel being a rather spooky place at the best of times, hidden away in a nooky dell between thick, mostly dripping wet  foliage in a secluded spot en route to Easedale Tarn. One room, too frightening for anyone even to contemplate to stay in overnight, had a big wet patch on one of the walls and a putrid smell of wastage, hinting at oozing ectoplasm, the remains of the not yet fully, still somewhat active, dead.

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We did Dove Cottage Saturday afternoon, getting us into the frame of mind of the Romantic situation. Obligingly, it was raining it down by the bucketfuls… Last year, on the first night, Paul Houghton, for some inexplicable reason, had turned all green in the pub, and we had, admittedly with not much success, tried after hours, in the cavernous basement, to conjure the spirit of my dead grandmother in a rather fruitless Seance. This time, some (!) beers in the pub later, with heightened senses and a high degree of exuberance, we did an extended reading in the lounge: a hellraisingly inspirational affair – we sampled some highlights of the Romantic repertory, and, best of all, excellent Creative Writing student work. We were all impressed by the high quality and intensity of the material. Lisa stood her ground, still capable of steering us through proceedings with a steady hand to the last.

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Next morning, some of us set off on a  6 1/2 mile walk around Lakes Grasmere and Rydal, which, rather than a gentle ramble, as promissed in the brochure, turned out to be a real hiking tour-deforce, well, at least to us Stokie couch potatoes, in excess of 4 hours: intensely enjoyable in many ways, but this is also where some suffering occured (as in ‘blistering good time’ of the first sentence of this). Let us spread the sponge of amnesia over this stinging aspect of an otherwise wholly enyoyable outing…

Great trip.

Dr Martin Jesinghausen

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Photography: Dr Melanie Ebdon

‘Digging Deeper’: Clay Cargo with Clayground Collective at the BCB: Poetry & Making

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Lisa Mansell and Barry Taylor took part in a poetry and making project with Clayground Collective at the British Ceramic Biennial last Saturday. The project was about poetic responses to ceramics and its relationship with waterways:

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“Clay Cargo takes inspiration from Josiah Wedgwood’s pioneering role in establishing the canals.  It sets out to renew the historic links between ceramics and the canal system by staging clay workshops on boats and canalside locations in three cities: London, Birmingham and Stoke on Trent.  This year we have also commissioned poets and ceramic artists to respond to each site”.  – See more at: http://www.claygroundcollective.org/clay-cargo-2014-digging-deeper-into-clay-canals-and-waterways/#sthash.Inmc7db8.dpuf

Three poets were commissioned to write responses: Barry Taylor, Elisabeth Charis and Rachel Long.

Last Saturday, Clayground Collective hosted a workshop in the BCB at the Spode Factory in which the poems were performed by the poets (Lisa Mansell read Elisabeth Charis’ poem) alongside ‘making’ sessions which invited the audience to make their own creative responses (either in clay or in words) to the poems and making.

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Graduate Publications

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Please join us in congratulating two former students of ours on their recent publications.

Emma Cleary, who gained her PhD in 2015 from Staffordshire University, has  short fiction publications in Lighthouse Literary Journal,  Synaesthesia Magazine, and is anthologised in Best British Short Stories 2015. Read her most recent story, “Moonsuit” in The Queen’s Head.

Holly Ice has just published a horror novella, The Russian Sleep Experiment with Almond Press:

“Four political prisoners living in a 1940s Siberian POW camp volunteer to be Subjects in a Soviet Military experiment. They are promised freedom in exchange for completing the exercise. In return they must endure 30 days without sleep, fuelled by Gas 76-IA. One researcher, Luka, stands alone in believing the experiment needs to be stopped before irreversible damage is done but is he too late? The Subjects no longer want the Gas switched off”.

Holly graduated from Staffordshire University in 2014 with a BA in Creative Writing.

Teaching Excellence

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Dr. Lisa Mansell, Creative Writing lecturer and award leader, has been made a Teaching Excellence Fellow at Staffordshire University. Her research project is about  the nature of adaptation: the rewriting of a text from one medium or genre to another. In particular, developing ambitious adaptations ranging from translation to the transposition of text from wiring to image. Her current research and reflective practice in the area of adaptation is influenced by the work of Fiona English, in particular, her book, Genre in Student Writing (London; Contiunuum [Bloomsbury], 2011). Fiona English asks students to re-craft or adapt a student essay into another genre, a process she calls’ regenreing’.  In Lisa’s study, she hopes to develop this practice into other disciplines and other discourses and areas of writing. In doing so she hopes to work towards a methodology for research, writing to discover new knowledge, that might be valid and useful not only for writers but for researchers and students in other disciplines.