Warning Signs

It’s been a crunchy couple of weeks for me, personally – crappy health and competing deadlines and all that. But I’ve managed to carve some time out to work on Spectral, so you get an update! A few weeks ago, I received the first set of official changes and suggestions from wonder-editor Harriet Evans, and managed to get some time with über-busy poetry powerhouse Bridget Hart of Burning Eye to talk about creating a content warning system for the book, so the past ten days has involved working on those two things, between bouts of illness.

Content Warnings are a touchy subject, even now. I, personally, used to be very wary of them – downright sulky about having to provide them where asked, in the past, if I’m honest – and we still don’t mandate them for the events that I run, though I do quite vehemently suggest nowadays that stronger opening topics do need a decent heads-up. Some people decry them as spoilers, or pandering, or incomprehensible – how are you to know what someone’s specific triggers are?! – but the last few years have given me some interesting insight into the value of them, and my approach has changed due to a couple of different demonstrations of best practice, and how much that contrasts with at least one demonstration of bad practice…

Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a great way to up your game (or decide that live performance art isn’t your game after all…) – the combination of pressure, reliance on yourself and others, the lack of resources and the wealth of opportunities, plus lots and LOTS of practice at honing your performance and hosting (and marketing, and networking, and quick-change costume, and hill-walking, and managing rejection) skills can be a game-changer. On top of that, you’re also witnessing how other people do it – well and badly! – and this can be really pivotal for your own work. Peering at my own hosting process these days, I notice that I’ve appropriated quite a few standards from other people that I liked: phrases and ways of expressing enthusiasm during warming a crowd up, adjusting the mic stand for people before they get there, providing a music stand so that people who read from hard copy can go hands-free, and the adaptation of Allographic’s infamous #NoApologies philosophy from people who hosted while I was recovering my voice. (I’d like to think that I’ve influenced a few others in turn re: no-kicking-down policies and checking performers’ pronouns as standard, but that’s not the point of this!) And my attitude to giving people more space in which to breathe at my events was massively altered by one friendly open mic in Edinburgh that I very nearly didn’t go to.

To Be Frank’s Edinburgh Fringe run in 2018 was produced by a group of young people from Bath, and hosted in Edinburgh’s radical bookshop. I came to show support to the featured cast and do a bit of open mic, and was blown away when a couple of lovingly pragmatic statements by the host shifted my worldview more than he could possibly know. Because I’d been to places where content warnings were encouraged/ enforced, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone say something like: “If you’re getting overwhelmed, please feel free to wander out into the rest of the bookshop if you need to take a moment, and then come back whenever.” It was the corollary to “you might be triggered” that I’d been missing all that time – “if you’re triggered, or potentially triggered, you can go, take care of yourself, and return, with explicit permission.” Knowing that I could leave and come back if I needed to… meant that I didn’t need to. It was quite an extraordinary experience, and I have now worked it into all my hosting duties, whether online or in person. You can come back is a huge thing to hear; you don’t have to reach fever-pitch and run away for good/ dissociate frantically while stuck in the audience. You’re welcome to practise good self-care.

And of course there was an experience of seeing it done badly which resolved me to be even stronger in my defence of content warnings. Short version: A Certain Famous Musician had a gig in Cambridge a few months before lockdown which almost had me on my knees with rage and anxiety. I started feeling quite quickly like I was the only person not signed up to the personality cult, and I left with most of my upper body in tetany from clenching my fists so hard. She sauntered through the audience, touching hands like a revivalist preacher, reached the stage, and launched into an anecdote which had immediate and graphic themes of what probably many would describe as sexual coercion and dubious consent, let alone underage activities and deeply sketchy power and age dynamics, then trilled: “Trigger warning! Hahaha!” into the somewhat stunned silence. She then told the audience that they could call out for her to play a particular riff when they were feeling sad and overwhelmed, because there was a lot of heavy stuff in the show. The third time someone asked for it, she was already cursing them and showing every sign of aggressive reluctance to comply, all the while telling us at every other turn that she practised “radical compassion”. If actual and timely trigger warnings (and actual pragmatic care) had been offered for the a) heavy, b) rambling, c) viciously self-aggrandising and seemingly endless show, I might have engaged better with the subject matter/ not binned the artist from my list of icons.

In a similar fashion, and with similar timing, I started interacting actively with fanfic in early 2018. Getting into the habit of reading – and writing – stories of sometimes graphically distressing topics turned out to be much easier to process/ avoid when feeling fragile due to the tagging system (which, to be fair, not everyone employs punctiliously). Knowing when/ how/ if to back out of something that tweaked my own personal “nope!”s didn’t lead to me having a more anodyne reading experience by any means, but it meant that (nearly) every engagement with the difficult stuff was done with informed consent, and the feeling of control I had over those situations helped me process topics that I did need to address, but which I might have just run away from entirely otherwise. It’s always jarring, by contrast, to find that book- and movie-buying is more fraught – I’m about to spend cash on this… am I going to end up chucking the thing across the room, having been ambushed for the sake of an author’s need to control my experience down to the jump-scare? or will I get my money’s worth?

Detractors of content notes and trigger warnings like to say that “life doesn’t provide trigger warnings!” Sure, but that’s wildly beside the point, in my opinion. Because, adequately informed about the potential dangers of a situation, we can choose to take precautions or avoid altogether. Besides, not only does nature provide plenty of safety warnings in the form of colouration, etc., we humans set up vast swathes of safety measures in actual, 3D life as well as art to give people that very choice: Low Bridge; Flood Warning; Falling Rocks; Oncoming Train; Construction Site; Wash Before Use; Wait For The Green Light; Contains Peanuts; Strobe Use; Foul Language; 18+; Danger: Quicksand; sirens and flashing lights; car horns and airbags; seatbelts; safety harnesses, goggles, and hard hats; lightning conductors; fire grates and tempered glass; gauntlets and sword guards; steam valves; antihistamines; steel toecaps; oxygen masks; lifeguards and buoys; red flags; Beware of the Dog; Here Be Dragons. A large part of the ongoing success of human society is its collaboration on preventing and mitigating danger – both physical and mental. Let’s face it: folklore and mythology is about 80% Don’t Talk To Strangers; Deep Waters Contain Scary Things; and Don’t Wander Off Into The Woods By Yourself, For Fuck’s Sake. (A lot of the rest of it appears to be about the dangers of jealous family members, which is interesting, but definitely a discussion for another time…)

Besides, if art is a conversation (and I strongly believe it is – or should be), then the power and control need to be equally shared between all participants, explicitly. And if art is a means to safely process the difficult things about life – a co-constructed virtual reality, if you like – it needs to practise compassion and informed consent in order for the messages artists want witnessed to be engaged with clearly. Anything else feels somewhat like bullying, to my mind.

So what’s that got to do with Spectral? you might be asking, if you’ve got this far and not been thoroughly derailed by my digressions (hi, nice to see you; thanks for persisting; please bear with me a little longer!). Well, I wanted to find a way to give common content warnings for the pieces without impinging on people’s reading experience – a way for those who wish to stay as safe as possible to do so, but also a way to not get “spoilers” if you’re feeling robust enough to handle any surprises. And, let’s face it, if you know anything about my work to date, you’ll be unsurprised to find themes of sexuality, gender, relationships, mythology, and the power that memory can hold over us popping up in the book. Talking to Bridget about it, she suggested a discreet colour code, which turned into me suggesting symbols (since internal colour was out), and together we worked out a suitable set of warnings (whittled down from a terrifyingly comprehensive 50-something to 27).

The, uh, fun thing about occasionally being so ill that you can’t sleep, is that you can find good distraction and productivity in small, low-stakes tasks. In this instance, having done a bit of research into standards for emblematic representation, and realising that I would have to draw the symbols myself where possible due to copyright restrictions/ lack of cohesive options elsewhere, I got stuck in and started ticking them off, starting with the quick wins. Having a drawing tablet and the recent practice in copying things has definitely borne fruit, as I seem to be much more able to transcribe my imagination than before. Using CorelDraw, I would scribble simple, sketchy versions, then play with the nodes to pose the figures. A lot of duplicating-and-mirroring gave some symmetry (better than relying on my current ability to draw something suitable twice reliably), and behold!

These are very much in first draft status, so I’m going to share a bunch that are either particularly common in the book, or about which I’m rather proud… or both.

In alphabetical order, the symbols above represent: bullying, childlessness, chronic pain and fatigue, conflict, death, depression, despair, implied sexual content, manipulation, mourning, regret, relationship breakup, toxic relationships, and transphobia.

Would love to hear if you can tell which is which, and what you think (bearing in mind these will probably need to be about a centimetre high each in the finished version!). They will, of course, be properly labelled in the final version!

Take Cover

It’s here! you asked how to pre-order Spectral, so I’ve set up a means to do so on the new Allographic Big Cartel shop. Which means I get to show off the beautiful art that Sa’adiah Khan created for the front cover of the book from Burning Eye.

I knew I wanted Sa’adiah’s art for this project well before I knew that Burning Eye were going to take it. As soon as the concept blossomed, I realised it needed her take on it to bring it further to life. You may know her as a community artist in Cambridge and nearby – she’s dedicated to bringing art to life in tiny, intricate, intimate pieces, and huge murals, broad and bountiful, and one of her most enduringly beautiful pieces is the collaborative mural which still adorns our local Co-op in Chesterton.

Sa’adiah had already provided the artwork for my show The Selkie a few years ago, somehow taking my rambling depictions and turning them into (sometimes eerily accurate in matching my mind’s vision) images to match the narrative, and I was thrilled to manage to book her for this project shortly after Burning Eye confirmed publication. 

With this being a much vaguer conceptualisation, she had to work in innovative ways to pull out what I needed, and, after various colour cut-ups (literally), kaleidoscopic animations, consultations, and very patiently tiffling about with hues and shadows until I was happy, she produced this absolute beauty:

Isn’t it lush?! I can’t wait to see what Clive does with the design, and am looking forward to making badges of it. In the meantime, please enjoy losing yourself in the layers (and, better, head over to Sa’adiah’s website to see more of the gorgeous colours and holistic visions she has to share; you might even find yourself joining in a drawing workshop!).

And, if you’re feeling as though, this close to Christmas, you’d like to support an independent publisher who does a great deal to make the work of performance artists come to life in print form, you could do a lot worse than donating to or buying some work from Burning Eye who, like a lot of artistic platforms, have been severely hit by the Pandemic.

Over on my poetry blog I’m also sharing sneak peeks into artwork I’m producing for certain pieces in the book, so do check those out – I’m hoping to bring new ones out every week from now until launch.

Applying Myself

 

Next year sees the tenth anniversary of publishing house Burning Eye Books, who’ve produced the collections of some of my favourite UK performance poets. Their focus has been consistently on platforming the work of word-wranglers who inhabit that interesting place between poetry, theatre, music, and stand-up. The sort of people who used to be traditionally, well, invisible to standard page publishers.

People like me, I suppose.

Imposter Syndrome is a funny thing – it can have you thinking you’re cheating and faking, especially when you do well, especially if it’s taken a while for other people who at least look like arbiters of success, to recognise your achievements and skills. Especially if you’ve ever been given grief for your endeavours. It makes it difficult to put yourself forward for opportunities because, well, they’d never pick me.

Last September someone told me that the next window for submissions to Burning Eye Books would give specific emphasis to welcoming artists inhabiting that interesting place between male and female. The sort of people who used to be traditionally, well, invisible to standard institutions.

People like me, in other words.

So I, high on the adrenalin of an excellent night of slam poetry, vowed (in front of witnesses) that this time, I’d actually apply. And in the new year, having moved into a different phase of my life on several fronts, persistently encouraged by a bunch of lovely people, I made a spreadsheet (obviously) for all the poems I felt folk would want to read, and started cataloguing them. And then I got ill. And then I hurled myself during the final 48 hours before the deadline into writing a proper submission for a grown-up version of the kind of stuff I’d been producing (a sample, a bio, and a proposal for the shape of the book; why will people buy this? who are you? what makes this – and you – special?). And, for once, I wrote that down and told them. (And got friends who know their stuff to check it, and they reminded me about other things I could say, so I said them too.)

Writing poetry is easy. Delineating your literary worth in an online form? Bit more of an ask.

Anyway, you may have seen this on social media already, in much pithier, more confident-seeming formats. But, in short: Clive and Bridget looked at the proposal, and in March, they said yes…

(Author image by Matt Widgery at the SHINDIG Storytelling Special.)

The book is currently called Spectral. It’s going to have a very specific concept underpinning its construction, and very beautiful cover art by local Cambridge artist Sa’adiah Khan, and I’ll be producing an audiobook version to match the current release date for the physical book in March 2022. You’ll be able to buy it in bookshops and online and did I mention that I’m still freaking out about this?

Today the knowledge that this is actually happening sinks that bit further into my psyche, and I’m abruptly grateful that the process of publication takes a lot longer with big publishers than with my own platform. (Oddly enough, my label, Allographic Press, has seen other of our writers ’graduate’ to Burning Eye and… I guess I’m one too, now…?)

The tenth anniversary publications list for BE looks like a grand mixture between some of my favourite poets (including people I’ve acted with, which is an interesting bit of world-collision!), people I’ve only heard of, and others I’m really looking forward to getting to know:

So I’ll be keeping you up-to-date with progress as it goes, in between small bouts of freaking out and rushing to complete deadlines at the last minute because really… that’s not going to change any time soon, let’s face it… Expect to see at least hints of art and contents pages, and possibly the occasional flail about audiobook production and other such fun stuff. I’ll be posting on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Soundcloud about All This, but expect the longer rambles to turn up here. And yes, this may be the final impetus I need to actually update my website for the first time in… okay, I’m not going to work out how long it’s been, just crack my knuckles and get on with it!

To everyone who’s encouraged, proofread, witnessed vows, made space for me to write in, squeaked with glee, and/ or shown absolutely no surprise whatsoever when I’ve told them this news… thanks! And if you’ve read this far, thank you too!

See, it’s important to have good friends around you. Folk who’ll gently (or not-so-gently) nudge you toward the things that make your life brighter, remind you that there’s space in which you can make and grow and thrive. That there are chances for those who might have considered themselves invisible to standards they think unattainable.

People like you. And me.

Blimey…

Showcase Your Words at the #VFreeFringe

 Hi Folks,

I’m writing this with my PBH’s Free Fringe Spoken Word Artistic Director (try saying that seven times quickly!) hat on:

This year, we’ll be putting on a digital version of the Fringe. Yes, things may change for the better and there may well be possibilities of socially distanced shows in the actual city of Edinburgh, but we also want to broaden out what we do, making it more accessible and more innovative, while still remaining free to both performers and audience, emphasising the role of a creative community in supporting each other, especially in these still-weird times.

We realise that a fair number of people find the idea of running/ creating digital shows unfamiliar and disorienting/ disconcerting, but we will also be providing a plethora of advice, guidance, tips and tricks (to audience as well as creators!), and face-to-face (online) training, as well as putting together a catalogue of useful resources from equipment and venue hire to filmmakers and audio specialists to marketing and social media integration. And we want to emphasise that you don’t need fancy equipment to make digital shows – one of our experts has been waxing lyrical about the sheer amount of high-quality content you can create with a smartphone (and will be putting together mini how-to instruction videos with that in mind, among other things).

And the difference between this and the in-person Fringe is that the only limit is your imagination. You can give us 10-minute videos to platform or 24-hour recitation marathons. You can pre-record, do live Zoom shows, give us a Facebook Livestreaming link, or give us the means to platform your audio-only podcasts, interviews, etc. If it belongs online, we want to help you broaden your audiences during August. We’ll also help with social media tie-ins now we have experts on board to help with that.

And we’re looking at clever ways to include the social aspects of getting together during Fringe as much as possible. Not only by including open mics, slams, and other cabaret events, but also virtual social spaces for people to drop into and chat with each other.

If you’ve always wanted to give the Edinburgh Fringe a go and have been limited by budget, time, energy, etc., this could be your opportunity to not only get involved for the first time, but be part of the inaugural Digital Fringe. And if you’ve been missing the Fringe, we’ve been missing you too – it would be great to see you!

I’ll be running online discussion sessions on Zoom specifically for people who want to bring spoken word shows to the Free Fringe during April and May 2021 (every Saturday, 12:30-13:30 GMT) and want to talk about the possibilities in person, as well as running training sessions on running good Zoom performance events. If you’re interested in finding out more, there’s a Facebook group for all interested parties: https://www.facebook.com/groups/vswpbhff21 and you can sign up for discussions by going to https://discussvswpbhff21.eventbrite.co.uk to reserve a place. (You need to have an authenticated Zoom account to join.) Watch this space for news about the training sessions, coming soon.

In the meantime, any queries, please comment here or email pbhspokenword @ gmail dot com

Talking About Talking About Thinking About Change

I’m heading back to “real work” soon – or at least that part represented by an office job (which will see absolutely no geographical shift away from my study/io for the moment, so adaptation will be… challenging on that front) – and, as I ease back into morning meetings (unnatural!) and people with different priorities and vocabulary to those with whom I’ve been interacting of late, they’ve already been asking how my year of Sabbatical has gone, what I’ve got up to, all that. Unlike those who use Sabbaticals to travel the world, I don’t have a ready store of photos and maps to demonstrate, and the last 5-6 months of this have been… less than ideal, let’s say… What I will say about residencies and commissions and adaptation to extreme conditions and writing fanfic to keep myself sane (hyperfixation on research has been a great tool of denial) and finally being able to pick up the voice work again will – I suspect – sound super-vague, though I should really give these clever, sociable, professionally good communicators the benefit of the doubt! Besides: in some ways we’ve faced more of the same challenges this year than might have been anticipated…

And so, ironically, it’s the most recent work I’m engaged in that might resonate most with people whose job is managing business change, and the psychological stages that go with it. I’ve been creating a poem commissioned by someone who needs to use it to talk about death and grief in a non-religious way. (So obviously it’s one enormous metaphor and, being me, I’ve snuck in references to the four elements, water being somewhat dominant here.)

One of the most fascinating aspects of this process has been writing something that needs to fit someone else’s voice, to a certain extent, because this poem is to be a tool that will doubtless get reshaped by use. Today’s discussion included not only hearing which bits they felt they could use and others… less so… but having the client read it aloud, while I tweaked a couple of lines to fit that, noting what stumbled and what flew, making further notes for more deep-seated transformations later. This is something I do on an almost unconscious level when writing something for my own voice, but doing it for another feels almost like brand-new process for me, and luckily the client’s ability to self-reflect is both skilled and generously shared.

I’m pretty sure this process could not have worked without that trust.

It now occurs to me that this is (new analogy alert) like creating a garment for someone else to use - not only do you take detailed measurements at the beginning, but you have to get them to try it on so you can make some parts tighter, others looser, and ensure that yet others can stretch as necessary, depending on circumstances. Sometimes you have to unstitch an entire panel and do it again.

And the knowledge that the creation will shape the user as well as the consumer is a heady one.

This poem is going to be released publicly as well, at some point in the future, for other people to use if appropriate, and I find myself quietly excited by that prospect, again in a different way from usual. It feels good to make something for people to use, when art is so often seen as a decoration, a luxury, a nice to have, when it actually underpins so much of what it means to be human, connecting our present to past and future, communicating so many things and used everywhere. That this is to be, far more explicitly than usual, a tool, gives me a very calm kind of satisfaction.

And if that’s all I ended up having to show for this year, it would be a mighty thing indeed.

Update: The text of the finished piece is here.

River Cam, August 2010

Out, Damned Spot! (Or: some people have trouble letting go, an exercise in catharsis.)

I’ve been bottling this for a couple of days. It is, however, time to get this poison out of my system so I can get on with some of the many awesome things my life contains at the moment. Last Friday (3-May-19), I hosted a Hammer & Tongue Cambridge as usual. It was a fine night in many respects – excellent performers, including last-minute support act the divine Rebecca Cooney; pretty lovely slam; one of my favourite local performers won; I got to see one of my closest friends after a few months apart; we got decent numbers in the audience; and the headliner, Jah-Mir Early, did his usual breath-stealing, improvisational spoken word magic. Why am I needing to vent about it?

Well. Glad you asked. I’ve been running Hammer & Tongue Cambridge as the host since January 2012. Before that it was run for just over two years by another host, who I won’t name. If you know who it is, you know who it is. I started “helping out” in April 2010, which meant: doing front of house, scoring the slam, and latterly doing a great deal (if not most) of the publicity work. In that time, HTC has moved from tiny, dingy pub venues (which I would also have to set up much of the time, and for which I bought lighting, basic sound equipment, etc.), through a much nicer bar venue, to a local arts centre which is wheelchair accessible, clean, and pleasant to be in. Where I no longer have to set up the box office myself, hoick the sound and light equipment up two flights of stairs, and fight my way out with them at the end of the night through lairy drunks (and that was in the nicer venue). Where forty people in the audience was considered the giddy zenith, that’s our baseline now. Our regional final sells out. We have a decent social media following on multiple platforms. We’re proudly part of a larger spoken word scene in the city which is burgeoning all the time. We run on time, break even/ turn a small profit on occasion, and can afford to pay headliner and support act small but reasonable fees without any external funding. The audience and performers are as safe as we can make them from insults and threats of violence.

None of those latter sentences should be remarkable, really, but they’re stated in strong contrast to how things were before I took on the mantle after the previous host stropped off because virtually no-one was turning up to the events, and no-one offered him the requisite “respect”. The penultimate two events under his aegis were totally paid for by me alone (headliner fees, publicity, etc.), and I had to absorb a great deal of aggression and posturing from this stale breadstick before we could all move on.

So far so okay, Fay, what’s your point? At the last event, one of the Old Guard, one who used to come and slam/ watch on the regular under the previous regime turned up. He stood out from the rest of the crowd because he got increasingly intoxicated (I use this word carefully) and lairy, having to be repeatedly asked to shush while other people were talking. Afterwards, having been sought out to be praised/ thanked by various members of the audience and other performers for my crowd control skills (which really shouldn’t have to happen!), I made the error of talking to this chap outside the venue as I waited for the headliner to get back. I warned myself against the desire to mollify aggressive men, but there you go – part of me wants as many members of my audience to walk away happy as possible.

Among other jabberings, he took the time to faintly praise me for “carrying the torch” (sic) of Hammer & Tongue Cambridge. It took me until I got home to work out quite why I was so annoyed by that particular phrase (probably because it was drowned out by what happened next). When I wryly thanked him, saying we’d carried it but changed its shape somewhat, he took the opportunity to complain about how he’d felt tense and repressed (at least, I think that’s what the crouching body language and bouncing, palms-down hands implied) throughout. Maybe I’d noticed, he confided, that he wasn’t entirely sober by the end. Yeah, I had. He theorised about my hosting style being responsible for this tension. This tension that, as far as I could tell, only he felt. He then appeared to do an impression of me speaking, murmuring: “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.” Then, as I barely responded past a side-eye from under my hat, repeated it: “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr,” complete with smirk and crouching little dance to complement his “feeling repressed” gestures of earlier. Yeah, I got it, dude – you think I’m a less than dynamic presenter.

I was able to pay the headliner and leave shortly after that. By the time I’d got home, after lengthy catch-ups with said beloved headliner and my other too-long-unseen friend, it turns out I’d let this fucknugget get in my head. “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of a softly-spoken, female-presenting person doing their job. “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of a mean schoolteacher oppressing the God-given rights of naughty men to be as loud as they want while someone else is talking. “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of someone who’ll never measure up to the shouty posturings of a third-rate poet and tenth-rate event host who used to drunkenly insult me from the stage and, I discovered years later, buy/ sell drugs in the carpark during the tediously extended intervals, taking up disproportionate swathes of time on the stage with his own repetitive work. My nights aren’t perfect. I could work harder at getting more people in, do more publicity, make more of a spectacle of it, but I’m never going to get loud just to suit other people – I decided long ago that that course of action gets you nowhere – they’re just going to have to lean in to hear better.

Last year a headliner calmly told the audience that he wanted to stalk me, and they seemed to lap it up. Certainly no-one told him off or offered me support afterwards. One of the audience, in fact, told me afterwards that I loved the headliner for it. I didn’t remonstrate with either of directly (too many years’ training of “mollify the man, soothe him in case he hurts you”?), but I’ve written a poem about it, so that’s all right. {eyeroll} It’s still a tough world as a female-presenting performer and MC. For every ten people or so who think I’m doing a good job, and loves what I’m doing as an artist and a host, there seems to be one who thinks I’m fair game for stalking, pervy comments about my voice, claims that my voice is “fake”, off-stage racist diatribes they think I’ll support, or jittery banter about my unshouty hosting style. “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.”

Carrying the torch? Fuck you, buddy. How about ditching a toxic legacy? How about transforming the event into something welcoming and professional? How about feeding and transporting that guttering flame and building a hearthfire? How about soldiering the fuck through with no support from my predecessor’s Old Guard? How about nearly four times the length of service in this event alone compared to his? How about the fact that I run a stage at Strawberry Fair that’s dedicated to spoken word and brings people in from fifty miles around? How about my five-star shows at Edinburgh Fringe? How about my BBC and other commissions? How about my national reputation as someone who works to raise and safeguard the spoken word scene? How about my national reputation as professional, hardworking, and talented? How about my well-known propensity to make every performer and audience member feel welcome unless they’re a hate-mongering douchecanoe? How about my small press, my open-hearted open mics, my fund- and awareness-raising for local charities, my groups set up to encourage and foster peer support among the spoken word community?

(Do you know how hard it is to write all the above without the likes of these Mehr-mehr-mehr arseholes’ voices chiming in my head telling me off for showing off? The lifelong legacy of making myself smaller that I have to actively resist every time I leave the house, let alone this?)

For some people you’ll never be other than the last (or first) time they saw you. For some people I’ll never be other than the victim of bullying at school, whichever part of that experience they were part of. For some people I’ll never be other than that administrator who was always late to work. For some people I’ll never be other than a certain person’s pathetic ex. For some people I’ll never be other than the quiet one who lost so spectacularly at whichever slam they saw me lose spectacularly at. For some people I’ll never be other than the nerdy sidekick of a misogynistic poseur. For some people I’ll never be other than a classical singer and choir conductor. For some people, I’ll never be other than Melody Starchild. For some people, I’ll never be other than the person who encouraged them to get into spoken word. For some people, I’ll never be other than the person who wrote that poem for their anniversary that made them cry. For some people, I’ll never be other than the first person who taught them about clerihews. For some people, I’ll never be other than the first person to publish them. And for some people, presumably, I’ll never be other than the Glastonbury Festival blogger 2019.

Tough breaks. You’ll forge your own destiny and some people will want to keep you down, cling onto the old version of what you were. Oddly enough, that was the subject of one of the first performance poems I ever wrote, way back in 2007, striving to survive on a scene that depended on the goodwill of the people still labelling me that person’s ex, the interloper, the Welsh one, the “failed lesbian” (true story). The crab bucket will always want to cling onto you, keep you chained, call you by your deadname, keep you from the light. The best thing for these remnants is to let them go with love, knowing that the shit you went through was one of the things that forged the stronger person you are now, but that you owe it – and these nostalgia hounds – absolutely nothing for the joy of finding your own path, your true name, the clothes that fit you far better. Let them go, and use your energy to cherish the people who’ll expand their first image of you into something complex and spectacular, and will help you find that joy. And let one of those people be yourself.

Photo of Fay Roberts hosting Hammer & Tongue Cambridge - (c) Nikki Marrone

So, That Happened...

(If you want to skip the build up via a history lesson and go straight to the announcement, click here.)

The first time I went to Glastonbury Festival was with my recently-ex-girlfriend – her dad had already bought the tickets for her birthday and we were trying hard to be friends at that point. We ended up camping on a slope above the Pyramid stage with my ex-boyfriend and his sporty mates. It was 2000, the year the Festival was massively invaded by ticketless rebels, and it’s a good job I’m not made panicky by crowds, that’s all I can say. It was, however, a year of record high pollen count, which saw me necking antihistamines and being barely able to breathe except at night. Add that to me being sensitive (and sometimes wildly allergic) to many of the various forms of weed in evidence, the sheer weirdness of spending time with my ex-partners, and it being less than a year after my mum had died; to say I experienced mixed emotions over the course of the long weekend would be stretching the phrase somewhat.

The next time I went to Glastonbury Festival was in 2003. I’d not long moved to Milton Keynes to live with my then-boyfriend. His disabilities meant that we didn’t camp (much to my not-so-secret relief), but stayed in a B&B nearby and drove in every day (that is to say: I drove in and out every day). A failure to communicate meant that we had to drive back to Milton Keynes the morning after we’d arrived to fetch the tickets, which we’d each assumed the other was bringing. I also developed some excellently hench upper body strength pushing a 14 stone sailor around fields in a manual wheelchair. We watched a lot of bands that he had only ever admired from afar, and I discovered reserves in myself that I might not have considered otherwise, as well as how much Lucozade can save your life when you’re driving that many miles sleep-deprived. And that Glastonbury-the-town was both beautiful and weirdly familiar.

The next time I went to Glastonbury Festival was in 2005 with my housemate, and our mutual friend from Milton Keynes. We camped quite far away from the main part of the festival on a well-found, gentle rise of ground, surrounded by many absolutely brilliant hippies. This turned out advantageous when the average rainfall for the whole of June came down overnight on the Thursday (lightning striking at least one of the stages during this time). I was inclined to blame the rain-summoning wooden frog I’d purchased the previous night which made a deliciously realistic croaking sound when I rubbed its wooden rod over the ridges of its back (which I demonstrated to everyone I met). I had a curiously restful night, all things considered; I’d finally worked out, after several painful years of camping at festivals, that I could wear earplugs overnight and sleep better, so ignored the thunder and rain (I grew up in Wales, after all) and had slept significantly better than my housemate, who was significantly less inured to thunderstorms. The main part of the festival was flooded, water running down from the higher ground like bona fide rivers in full spate.

Can you see the woman in the background floating serenely on a purple blow-up chair?!

We put pedal bin liners over our socks and waded into action, buying cheap wellies on site that we still have today (as well as me buying myself a massive stick with a dragon’s head on it – it seemed like a great idea at the time, and subsequently proved useful in both mud and moshpits). We had more regrets about the 2am hog roast, which left us in a very bad way later, and my OCD was tested to its creaking limit by the mud and ankle-deep slurry from the flooded toilets, but survived sufficiently to want to go again. It was also the first time I’d been to an outdoor festival while menstruating. I don’t recommend it. We watched the sun come up over the stone circle on the Sunday and accidentally took part in a hand-fasting ceremony (as witnesses; the gentleman who officiated turned out, many years later, to be someone I now know in Cambridge as one of the other organisers at Strawberry Fair…). When we told people about it after we got back to our tents for a disco nap, one person said “Oh! Cool! I didn’t see that on the programme…!” Hmm.

The last time I went to Glastonbury Festival was in 2007 with my former-housemate-now-girlfriend, and the same mutual friend as before (who didn’t know that we were going out). In order to get the tickets, we’d had to inveigle internet use from the owner of the hotel we were staying in for a hen do in Brighton (this involved flattery, late-night listening, and an early morning shoulder massage) the night before tickets went on sale. I honestly don’t know how our luck held so well to get tickets, but get them we did. Once there, we spent a far greater deal of time in the more alternative parts of the Festival (green fields, cabaret, etc.), as the main parts seemed to have changed their atmosphere significantly from the first time I’d been. I wrote, somewhat meanly, about being "… fed up with the shiny Sloanes/ Uncomfily dressed-down with all/ Their moans about the bogs and bands,/ Who sign African petitions/ Yet refuse to bin their cans…" Because by that point I was writing poetry, but was too chicken to sign up for the open mic/ slam (I think there was a slam?) at the difficult-to-find, tiny poetry tent (though, thanks to my partner dragging me along, I did get to see Sophia Blackwell for the first time, resplendent in what my memory insists on picturing as a froofy cocktail dress and red wellies, along with Danny Chivers, performing poetry and hooking me even further into the notion that this was something I could be doing). This time, instead of bucketing it down for four hours, then being gloriously sunny, it was persistently wet in a phenomenon known technically as a monsoon (no, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a British monsoon either). I left the farm feeling very old, somehow, and coughing my lungs up for a couple of weeks afterwards.

(I look back at what I blogged about the experience and I shudder at some of the language I use, that now looks incredibly snobbish and horribly like internalised misogyny to me.)

I applied several times after that to perform at the Poetry & Words stage. It’s hard to say whether it was including footage of the aforementioned poem which did for my chances, but I strongly suspect it was purely because I didn’t have the experience, and similarly didn’t have high enough quality footage (or poetry, arguably) to be persuasive. A few years of failed applications (and failed attempts to get tickets the normal way) later, I decided that I was never going to get to play in those kinds of leagues, and resolved to be happy with my spoken word scene tier. (Or, to put it another way: I decided that the pain of rejection was too much and played it safe for a few years.)

So to say I was shocked when I received the email a couple of months ago asking me if I’d like to be part of it would be putting it mildly. I rushed to my girlfriend (same one as shared the last two Glastonbury Experiences) to check whether I was reading it right. I was. Instead of sitting on the opportunity for weeks until they gave it to someone else, as I’m so magnificently good at doing, I wrote back with alacrity and said “Yes please.” So now, somehow, twelve years later, I’m going to Glastonbury again – this time as official chronicler of the event from the perspective of the Poetry & Words stage. I’ll be writing, and the brilliant Scott Tyrrell will be making art of it all, and between us you’ll be as good as there while reading the blog.

(No, I have no say in the poets chosen, and no, I can’t get a plus-one for you. If I could, I’d be bringing my partner, oddly enough…)

I am still equal parts terrified and delighted, and I suspect that this state of affairs will continue for the next few months (during which I’ll be telling you about the line-up as it’s released, so please do follow the blog!).