MAH17: Bad Language at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
84 Plymouth Grove,
Manchester, M13 9LW

18 May 2017, free entry
Performances 6.30pm – 9pm

Live literature organisation Bad Language has been the recipient of not one, but two Saboteur Awards (a record in the history of the award) in recognised for drawing stand-out headliners to their monthly free night, as well as programming events with authors including Booker Prize longlistees at high profile venues and festivals. Now, for Manchester After Hours 2017, Bad Language presents an evening of immersive storytelling in the beautifully-restored surrounds of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, where the interior is just as it would have been in 1857.

Rosie Garland, Abi Hynes & Joe Daly will read specially-commissioned pieces responding to the living history of the house; pieces on display include the desk that Elizabeth Gaskell, author of Mary Barton and North and South, was constantly interrupted in her writing with questions about the children, or how long to boil the beef for tea. The promenade style performance will give attendees a chance to admire the wool carpets woven to a mid-19th century design, or the window where Charlotte Brontë hid behind the curtains, too shy to join the company.

poetrynites@thebookcase

on Saturday May 13th
with Rosie Garland, Jodie Hollander
and Charlotte Wetton

Same time (7 – 9 pm)
Same price (£6 with wine and refreshments)
Same fantastic poetry lined up at Hebden Bridge’s The Book Case!

The Book Case
29 Market St
Hebden Bridge
West Yorkshire
HX7 6EU
01422 845353
www.bookcase.co.uk

Rosie Garland might be better known as Mslexia Prize winning author of The Palace of Curiosities and Vixen, but she is also a poet who skillfully treads the line between performance and the lyric. Her new collection, As In Judy (Flapjack Press, 2016) is as inventive and politically engaged as her previous body of work, and ‘imagines the inner and outer landscapes we all inhabit with eloquence and grace’.

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Jodie Hollander is an American poet visiting the UK to launch her first full collection of poems, My Dark Horses, from hot new poetry imprint, Pavilion Poetry. Interspersed with versions of Rimbaud, and always alert to the surreal comedy of the human condition, these powerful and immediate poems chart with huge passion, musicality and insight a complex journey towards familial understanding and reconciliation.

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Witty and compelling, Charlotte Wetton’s debut pamphlet, I Refuse to Turn into a Hatstand (Calder Valley Poets), shows a young poet skillfully in charge of her material. Her spoken word album Body Politic was released in 2012.

and we will make love
on the stone flags, on the dirt of the yard,
until dusk falls, salt stiffens on cooling skin,
and the cicadas sing and sing until death.’

(Charlotte Wetton ‘In Mexico’)

Tickets in advance or on the door from The Book Case, 29 Market Street, Hebden Bridge. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

New writing & music at Sandbar, Manchester

120 Grosvenor Street, M1 7HL

free event!
7.30pm-10pm
Detail tbc

Here be Tygres – fanzines and my life underground

I’ve been thinking about the impact fanzines have made on my life – and the result is this blog! Enjoy…

For someone who really was a Teenager in Devon (the poem isn’t an exaggeration http://www.rosiegarland.com/news-and-events/item/53-i-want-to-be-a-teenager-in-devon.html ), it’s hard to overstate the impact on a fifteen-year old geek girl of a let-off-the-leash long weekend in London.

Mid 1970s. Mum sets a friend and me up in a vicarage beyond the twilight zone of the North Circular. Every morning we take two long bus journeys into central London. My mate smokes cigarettes and swills cider like any normal teenager. I haunt Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, Atlantis Bookshop and the innumerable second-hand bookshops around Soho. It’s a four-day sojourn in a tatty oasis for the starved mind and spirit. As well as the books and comics I expect, I also discover fanzines.

They flick an entirely different switch in my imagination.
I’ve been making magazines since I was a kid, but now see I’m not the only nerd in the world to spend evenings with glue and a stapler. Even more groundbreaking, the zines cover interests I’ve learnt to conceal in order to limit my bullied isolation: horror movies, vampires, sci-fi, punk, weird illustration, weirder literature. The Gothic, in short. For the first time in my life, I see myself reflected. I encounter an underground community of the imagination. I know I’ll never meet any of these fellow-weirdoes, but I am not alone.

I return to the mix of beauty and soul-death of rural Devon (miles north of the artsy bit around Totnes), grit my teeth, make it to 18 and escape. In my new home, Leeds, one of the first things I do is check out the 2nd-hand / radical bookshops (a tip ‘o the pen to Austicks & The Corner Bookshop). As well as reviews in mainstream music papers such as Sounds, Melody Maker & NME, I now feature in fanzines that interview my band The March Violets (eg Rendezvous, Attack on B-Zag, The Angels are Coming, Whippings & Apologies – best zine name ever IMHO). We even produce our own Violets zine. High production values, or handwritten, it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the vibrant build-your-own record label / indie scene of the early 80s.

Another hiatus follows when I quit the UK to work in Sudan from 1984-1986. In 1987, semi-fanzine independents Shocking Pink & Spare Rib inspire my move to Manchester where I find a thriving LGBT scene. However, it soon becomes apparent that being a dyke AND a Goth is a step too far. I have no problem making the connections between goth, punk and post-punk, fetish, feminism, queer, vampires and weird literature but I’m damned if I can find a queer pal who’ll go to The Banshee with me. As for my penchant for leather trousers, the less said about that the better. I can come out, but not about everything. However, late 80s feminism is a different blog.

It seems I can still feel isolated in a massive city, and I learn what it’s like to be marginalised within a marginalised community. I need help, and once again find it in the fanzines of the late 80s / early 90s. One particular pleasure is Dominic Regan’s graphic Dom Zombi story in AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia ) which drew everything together so succinctly. Others include: For the Blood is the Life, Bats and Red Velvet, The Velvet Vampyre, Udolpho and early issues of Skin Two (produced on Tim Woodward’s kitchen table). Listings of penpals, society meetups and clubs provide me with a flesh & blood community, not simply one of the imagination. All of it pre-internet, off the map, under the radar. I even meet a bisexual Goth.

Jump cut to the present day.
I’m excited and encouraged by the rebirth / renaissance of Xeroxed, glue-and-collage, passed from hand-to-hand zines. There’s a fresh new family of folk learning the liberating impact of turning off search engines so your keystrokes can’t be tracked in order to tailor more bloody advertising into your feed. To quote Keith Lowell Jensen: “What Orwell failed to predict is that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching” https://twitter.com/keithlowell/status/347741181997879297

Only last year I met a woman in Athens, Georgia, who knew my work because she’d come across Pink Bomb, a CD fanzine produced in Manchester by the radiant Ste McCabe . Our words don’t need wifi to span the globe. And if you can’t hold something in your hands, it doesn’t really exist.

Fanzines are still there when the battery runs out on your phone. When some yellow-haired dictator decides you can’t Google ‘that’ article any more. Fanzines can’t be deleted at the swipe of a button. So - Buy that ancient typewriter. Get stapling.

© Rosie Garland 2017‏

Thank you to Sharon Zink for interviewing me for her blog, The Book Diner!

The blog title says it all - "History, Time Machines and Circuses: Novelist, Poet and Rock and Cabaret Star, Rosie Garland, brings her Magical World to the Book Diner"
… with some ruminations on research & how to keep going thrown in...
you can read the full text here:
http://sharonzink.com/the-book-diner-interviews/history-time-machines-and-circuses-novelist-poet-and-rock-and-cabaret-star-rosie-garland-brings-her-magical-world-to-the-book-diner/

Rebel Dykes & For Books’ Sake at Wonder Women Festival

HOME
2 Tony Wilson Place,
Manchester, M15 4FN
12th March 2017

4:00-6.00pm
From £4

Created by a Manchester-based queer film crew, Rebel Dykes tells the story of a bunch of kick-ass women from London in the post-punk 1980s. The Rebel Dykes challenged norms ahead of the international riot grrrl movement, and the film features women’s punk music, animation, archive material and recreated footage. This queer-punk documentary is in post-production, and HOME will screen the work-in-progress cut which sold-out at BFI Flare in March 2016.
This will be followed by a showcase of incendiary poetry and performance put together by For Books’ Sake, featuring blisteringly bold and brilliant queer women writers from across the UK. Expect exciting, powerful spoken word that celebrates sexuality, rebellion and revolution, featuring Majikle, author of Margaret Thatcher Made Me an SM Dyke; internationally renowned poet, playwright and educator Sophia Walker, author of Opposite the Tourbus (Burning Eye Books); and Manchester literary luminary and dark fiction darling Rosie Garland, author of numerous poetry collections and novels The Palace of Curiosities, Vixen and The Night Brother (forthcoming from Borough Press), compered by For Books’ Sake founder Jane Bradley.

Curated by Instigate Arts
Collection in aid of MASH, Manchester Action on Street Health

http://forbookssake.net/events/event/rebel-dykes-wonder-women-manchester/

https://www.creativetourist.com/event/rebel-dykes/

Women of the World Festival Cabaret

Clore Ballroom,
Level 2
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

9-11pm

Diva Hollywood is producing and hosting the Friday night Cabaret event for the Wow Festival in March at The South Bank. A diverse and delicious cabaret, which is not for the faint hearted. Celebrating topics of gender, disability, body image and much more.
She has hunted far and wide and brought together the finest and most challenging female performers from around the globe for Divalicious Cabaret. They will shock you, break your heart, make you laugh, entice and tease you but most of all make you remember that the 21st century Woman is Diverse and Delicious.

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/women-of-the-world

WORD!

is the longest running poetry and spoken
word night in the Midlands.

Y Theatre
7 East Street,
Leicester, LE1 6EY

£4 / £7

8pm (performers 7pm)

Based at the Y Theatre, Leicester, it takes place on the first Tuesday of every month, between 8.00 and 10.30pm. The evening is composed of an open mic, followed by special guest Rosie Garland.
PLUS
Creative writing workshop with Rosie Garland 4-6pm

http://wordpoetryleic.blogspot.co.uk/

Dolly Mixtures

Royal Exchange Theatre,
St Ann's Square,
Manchester, M2 7DH

Free entry
From 7.30pm

Cabaret and spoken word evening to celebrate Wonder Women Manchester Festival. Featuring Rosie Garland, Kate Fox, Stefanie Fetterman, Jane Bradley & many more...
A variety showcase of the most cutting edge feminist theatre and performance. From poetry to classical, from theatrical performance to cabaret and much more. Expect to be rattled and roused. But be warned, contents are not sweet! Curated by Instigate Arts.

We are asking for donations on the night which will be split between artists and our selected charitable cause.

https://www.creativetourist.com/event/dolly-mixtures/

UTTER! Lutonia
The Hat Factory
65 - 67 Bute Street,
Luton LU1 2EY

Thursday 2nd March, 2017
19:30 - 22:30
£5 / £3 concessions
To book tickets please call 01582 878100
UTTER! Spoken Word brings a Panoply of spoken word and literary talent from the locality and beyond.
The bill features: Rosie Garland
The night will be powerful and enlivening, full of bubbling words and running rhythms, voice and mind connecting directly in a room alive with ideas. Compered by Lee Nelson “Our very own peoples’ poet” – Luton News, the keeper of Luton’s live-poetry flame, veteran of the Glastonbury and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals.
http://www.lutonculture.com/hat-factory/whats-on/2017/03/02/utter-lutonia-14/2170/