"In August most of Europe goes on holiday"

In Frome however, summer holidays come to us, with a beach party throughout Sunday's Independent Market.               Sand, seagulls, seaside disco and superbly steady sunshine supplemented by seaside disco to create this blissful idyll in the market yard, with retro photo-booth, donkey rides and ice-pops (I chose Pina Colada, but no-added-sugar, so that's ok.) With all the usual artisan food, art & craft, and clothing stalls, extensive flea market, and busking stage including a great set from Leander Morales, this street market unfolded into a perfect English holiday.
 
Writers don't stop for the sun, of course: Words at the Black Swan monthly workshop was led in the afternoon by Bath poet Sue Boyle who led us into the magic of mysterious glimpses in poetic postcards,
 and then a swift scamper up to the Merlin amphitheatre to join the 'Flash Fiction' picnic. Organised by Frome Writers Collective, this was a great little showcase of the group's varied talents: the challenge was a 500-word story starting There's that sound again, & I loved the winning story by Alison Murdoch, a witty sci-fi take on trying to live in a human body when you've never heard of hiccups...

Meanwhile, Frome's new theatre company Shot In The Dark is heading for Edinburgh with a fair wind blowing from a big plug in The Scotsman for their suspense thriller Rope. It's a psychological study of a Dostoevskian motiveless murder, and writer Geoff Hunt who also directs, has studied several real-life cases to create a site-specific scenario for the streets of Edinburgh. If you're heading for the fringe festival, this is a production to look out for. A line-run before the trip gave me an opportunity to hear the script and take some typical, and non-typical, pictures of the show. Guess which this one is...

 Looking ahead even further, Nevertheless fringe theatre company is making big plans for the future and for our next production, so I'll end this post with me and Rosie plotting... at Castello, if you're wondering where in Frome is good for planning your own next artistic endeavour. Other venues also available....

Full moon medley

 Frome Writers Collective, launched this summer to stimulate writers in every genre, held a Flash Fiction contest in the Merlin foyer on Sunday. We heard 14 short tales with a twist, and winners by public vote were local writers Alison Clink and Tim Luther. A well-organised and entertaining event from team FWC~ and thanks also to Mary Macarthur whose gentle interview with me as the 'Bard of Frome' is currently featured on their homepage. I'm never sure what to say when asked for advice to the unconfident, so I hope it doesn't sound perverse to suggest "Do it the way you would do it if you could do it..." 
Playwright David Greig was asked for advice for a BBC Writers Room feature: his response is great, and all the better for referencing PG Wodehouse's maxim to 'apply the seat of the trousers to the surface of the chair'.
"The main thing is to get to the end. Don’t worry about the quality moment by moment but regard what you are writing as placeholders until you find out what you are doing and then improve it later. The creative stuff happens with the improving, honing, cutting, observing and chipping away. The simple act of getting through it is a huge, huge thing. The second thing is to always remember that your subconscious mind knows better than your conscious mind. Trust a bit of writing because it came to you by surprise and follow the byways of your subconcious rather than sticking rigidly to the dictates of your boring, conscious mind. We pay to hear things that surprise us." 

David Greig's latest play The Events had rave reviews but I missed it in London so this picture is from Midsummer, his sweet, clever, funny play from four years ago. I saw it, bought the script and saw it again and ~ because it's not plagiarism it's craft ~ used one of his techniques in my own play Muffin Man which won me the title Bard of Frome, tying in nicely with the opening of this post.

Words at the Black Swan writing group reconvened to interrogate Tristan Steven's esoteric & fascinating exhibition FIFTHWALL ~ here's a sample of the installations, and an image from a very different summer exhibition in La Strada where Paul Newman is showing his exquistite pencil drawings. Tristan invites viewers to 'Come and play in the sacred sand pit of life!' while Paul's images evoke a sense of elemental connection the awe and mystery of nature that's also in its own way child-like.

To complete this disparate batch of points to ponder, how about this: Whatever you think about amazon they appear to be working in your interests in one thing. A long email they sent out to all Kindle publishers yesterday reminds us that paperback technology was initially rejected by bookshops and writers alike ~ including even George Orwell ~ as destroying literary culture. Subsequent history, they claim, is pertinent. "Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.  Just as paperbacks did not devalue or destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books."  They might undermine charity shop sales, though...

"There's something about theatre in a confined space that's quite special" Niamh says "- anyone jaundiced with lavish traditional productions should try this - five quid for a seat on the sofa and great entertainment." We were at the double bill of one-act plays UPSTAIRS at the LANSDOWN, a tiny pub theatre in Clifton, more like voyeurs than audience. Both pieces were energetically acted and directed by students from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School - yuppy humour in About a girl who... by Stephen Vagg and anarchic hilarity in 1% Inspiration.
Written and directed by Lars Harald Gathe, this is a brilliant & absurd 'deconstruction and reinvention' of Ibsen's Ghosts, the famously "dirty deed done in public" that shocked the 19th century theatre-going world. Especial praise to Jack Holden as Osvald and Nick Blakeley as assistant Harry, chronically confused, who had hoped "this was going to be something real." But Al the manic Director is changing the concept. A talking badger, a buffet, a song and dance routine with no actors – they’re out to lunch, literally until it chokes them. Al sees his role, apart from sitting on the red sofa staring at the wall, as a calming influence: he counters Mrs Alving's script complaints ( "When you look at life, everything is a bad translation") and consoles baffled Harry: “My grandmother told me this on her deathbed: It’s all useless. It’s all a waste of time.” Not this though- a thoroughly enjoyable night of new writing and emerging talent.

Eclecticism means never having to say you're copying... Last year Alison and I went down to Brighton to check out their (hugely funded) Small Wonder lit-fest event and came back fired with enthusiasm to recreate the event, better, unfunded, ourselves. Hence was born Frome FLASH FICTION Friday, story-telling crossed with slam, agreed by all who crowded into the Merlin foyer last night as fabulous fun. The lucky-dip format kept tension high but no-one overran their allotted 4 minutes so we had time for everyone who wanted to read.
Our judges – publisher Barry Cunningham, novelist Debby Holt, and lyricist Brian Madigan – had the tough task of on-the-spot marking so many excellent pieces to a nail-biting finale with two writers recalled to the mic: Jeremy Gibson and Gordon Graft, both best-known for their poetry. A swift secret ballot resulted in FFFF logo teeshirts for both and the £40 prize to Jeremy for his wicked black comedy Happy Endings. Congratulations to all 21 writers brave enough to stand up and be voted, and to create such a fantastic evening of entertainment.

This week we're talking shoes... their stories, the characters they create and convey. It's the first "7 AGES OF SHOES" drama workshop, held at the Merlin foyer. Writer-friend Niamh Ferguson has teamed up with me for this project, conceived while watching the Show of Strength 5-minute pieces in shops in Bedminster earlier this year & thinking: we could do stuff like that in Frome. The shoes stimulus was Niamh's idea, and proved a wonderful starting point for great writing. Several of these pieces were polished up with help from the Writers' Circle at Rosie's on Wednesday so we're on the way to an evening of monologues.. a season of short plays... .

We're expecting a full house for the Flash Fiction event Alison and I are running on June 19th - another stolen idea, freely adapted from Brighton's Small Wonder contest. We've got some excellent judges: publisher Barry Cunningham - he first picked Harry Potter from the slush pile - with effervescent novelist Debby Holt and Brian Madigan, lyric-writer extraordinaire. Fun and frolics for all, and forty quid for the winner - come along. There's a teeshirt with our logo on too, how Fromeishly cool is that.