Wilco Spinach

Posted on by Dan Powell
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Been a little quiet here, due in part to my being busy working on a short story for this, research for this and coming down with a nasty cold of the bone-chilling, head-squeezing variety. Started feeling a little better today, which is in no small part due to this rather brilliant video of Wilco’s Dawned on Me:

Apparently it’s ‘the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in more than 30 years.‘

You can find out more about it at wilcospinach.com (how cool is that url?)

Normal service will resume shortly with, amongst other things, the skinny on my actually making a start on my MA novel, the first of 2012′s My Life in Short Fiction posts, and some awesome news that I can’t wait to share. Until then, I might have to see if some spinach can get me back on my feet.

Living Room Stories – Review

Posted on by Dan Powell
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Living Room Songs is a collection of pieces recorded by Ólafur Arnalds which, some of you may recall, made the number two slot of my Top 5 Writing Music Albums of 2011. While I was busy last November,  drafting short fiction while listening to the album on repeat, Andy Harrod was going one step further and writing flash fiction directly inspired by the moods and tones of each of the seven tracks. The result is the excellent Living Room Songs. Andy presented each piece on his blog to read for free, perhaps inspired by the tracks of Living Room Songs being available for free download on the album’s website. Following this, he decided to produce a limited run physical release.

Living Room Stories – Handmade Edition comes  in the form of a seven-inch vinyl sleeve containing a front cover and the seven individual stories presented upon separate cards, each with their own attendant artwork. For anyone of the generation that remembers handling vinyl singles it is a wonderfully tactile choice that fits the music-inspired nature of the project perfectly. Each piece provides a glimpse of a scene, telling the story of a couple in snapshot, each ‘track’ managing to remain both separate from yet still informing the others in the set. I found the stories compelling and not a little mysterious. The spaces that Andy Harrod leaves within the ‘story’ of Living Room Songs allow the reader to fill in the gaps and make the story along with him. Such an approach works well alongside the music as the prose mirrors and maintains the tone and mood of the piece it is inspired by, a feeling or image carrying the reader in the same way that music carries a listener. In fact, I followed the advice of the introduction and took the time to listen to each track along with the reading of the relevant piece, something I would recommend (the songs can be downloaded for free, and indeed purchased, here).

A  tender peek into the emotional landscape of a realtionship, Living Room Stories bridges the spaces between flash fiction and poetry and music. The layered descriptions and building up of resonant imagery both within each piece and across the ‘prose-album’ gives a sense of crisis and rising emotion that can’t help but engage the reader. It is an interesting experiment in creating fiction from music and a beautiful object that truly comes alive when reading along with the music which inspired it. The first edition run of 25 copies sold out in only 36 days but lucky for you, dear reader, the second edition is now available, and I would recommend grabbing a copy while it is still available.

If interested you can look at a digital preview Living Room Stories here.

Mrs Dalloway is on the Landing

Posted on by Dan Powell
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Christmas 2010 I bought this for Mrs P because she loves Susan Hill’s books:

It’s a memoir of Hill’s year spent reading only books shoe already had sitting on the shelves of her home.

Fast forward through the next twelve months, during which at least one of the following statements was made by Mrs P every time new books arrived via the post (which she collects) or over the ether to my Kindle (many repeated more than once over the period):

‘Not more books.’

‘You must have more books than you can read before you die.’

‘Someone’s been on Amazon again.’

‘Do you actually need anymore books?’

‘It’s Christmas everyday for you, isn’t it?’

‘There’s only so many books anyone needs, even you.’

To put these comments in perspective I should tell you that my wife loves books, she’s an English teacher. She herself has shelves of unread novels and non-fiction waiting patiently for her attention. For her to make the above comments takes pretty exceptional circumstances, circumstances like these. Since starting on my OU course in Creative Writing back in 2008 I had been buying more books; short-fiction, writing texts, novels, non-fiction for research, you name it, I’ve been buying it. My increased appetite for books (and to be fair I was already a pretty extravagant book buyer) developed at the same time as my renewed focus on my writing. And it isn’t just the bookshelves that are groaning under the weight of my unread reading material. My Kindle too is full of intangible books requiring my attention. The rapidly growing piles of books all across the  house could not continue unabated. I was even beginning to feel guilty myself about not reading this stuff.

One of the many shelves of unread books requiring my attention (with the exception of Being Dead, a fave of mine that is on this shelf to prompt a re-read, and The Invisible Man, which is a new copy with an intro I want to read)

Just before new year we were talking about this, a discussion prompted by my downloading about thirty books on the Kindle from their 12 Days of Christmas sale, during which I made an at-the-time flippant comment about maybe doing a Susan Hill. My wife wasn’t sure what I meant. I reminded her of the book I bought her the previous Christmas, Howard’s End is on the Landing.

‘I should do like she does in that memoir and spend a year not buying books. I should just read stuff already on the shelves and on my Kindle,’ I said.

‘Bet you can’t,’ my wife replied.

And so the challenge was set. We worked out a series of simple rules:

  • I am allowed to receive books as gifts/or review copies.
  • I can buy any texts NECESSARY for my MA
  • If I buy anything else then I have to cook all meals for a week. (I hate cooking. This is the best kind of motivational threat for me).
  • The period of time must be exactly one year.

Long story short: I can buy a book again on the 1st January 2013.

I am now onto the third week of the challenge and am finding the experience refreshing. I have already read one book that has been sat on my shelf for far too long a while (The Pearl by John Steinbeck) and am enjoying picking out stuff from my shelves and dipping in to see what takes my fancy. The plan is to clear the massive pile of short fiction collections I have amassed in the last few years, along with a fair few classic novels that I should really have read or re-read by now. Not sure what I am going to tackle next novel-wise, at the moment it’s a fight between Anne Enright’s – The Gathering, Mrs Dalloway and Robinson Crusoe, but that could change as something on the shelf or in my Kindle collections catches my eye. The time I save trawling Amazon for new purchases should free up a big chunk of reading time too. It sounds easy now but looking at this list and this list of upcoming publications for 2012, the real test is going to be when something by one of my favourite authors is released. In the meantime, I apologise if you have a book out this year, but I am prohibited from buying it, however fabulous it might be. That said, you could always bung me a review copy.

I would also point out the  irony of this challenge being inspired by a book my wife owns and has yet to read, but that would be churlish. And anyway, I have to go. Mrs Dalloway is on the landing, saying something about flowers.

The results are in…..

Posted on by Dan Powell
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The list of authors with stories accepted in Caroline Smaile’s charity anthology in aid of  One in Four has been published. It’s full of some great writers, many of whom I know in passing or fairly well via the social power of the interweb. It also features my name. I’m super-pleased to have two 100-word stories work accepted for inclusion in the collection. Here’s to it raising lots of cash for a very worthwhile cause.

The stories included in the collection had to be inspired by songs. For those interested, the songs that provided inspiration for my stories were this:

Neko Case – This Tornado Loves You

and this:

Los Campesinos! – In Media Res

Can’t wait to see what tracks had other people scribbling stories.

A couple of other exciting bits of news in the announcement post are:

  • Becky Adams (she designed/hand-stitched both the covers for Caroline’s novel ‘Like Bees to Honey’ and novella ’99 Reasons Why’) has agreed to design the front cover
  • There is talk of a singer-songwriter, mid-1980s pop-teen-idol-star writing the foreword.

Congratulations to everyone who got a piece accepted. Now let’s promote the arse off this and get lots of cash to a good cause.