Leaving Home

So long, farewell,

Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight...

I've decided to leave Blogger behind and move over to WordPress where I can make my world look prettier. Thank you for reading and putting up with my terrible poetry, and I hope you continue to follow me over to WordPress where I will be rambling about literature events, writery things  I love, and the pain of trying to study for my MA in Creative Writing.

So, here's one final farewell, and a link to my new site: www.niciwest.wordpress.com

Come and say hello and tell me what you think.

Retale

Six writers. Six stories. One shop.

Re:Tale is a innovative and exciting literature event taking place in the labyrinthine setting of Jigsaw, in Manchester. Six up and coming writers will tantalise your literary taste buds by telling six stories based around the strange and wonderful world of customer service.

Daniel Carpenter, Joe Daly, David Hartley, Nick Garrard, Nici West and Fat Roland are Manchester based writers, some of whom have come from literature collectives Bad Language and Flash Tag. Bad Language run regular live literature events and publishes a quarterly anthology of live writing. Flash Tag run flash fiction writing competitions and the occasional night featuring literary smut.

This is a first time collaboration between these six writers and a first literature evening for the clothes store in the Triangle shopping centre. They hope to mix to the retail space and fictional prose writing to bring you a night of humour, unease and surreal fun.

Thursday 17 November 7.30pm

Re:Tale

Jigsaw, Exchange Square, M4 3TR Manchester, United Kingdom ·

Tickets £4/£2 advanced tickets from: http://retale.eventbrite.co.uk/

http://retalemcr.wordpress.com/

Bad Shoes Festival

You might be surprised, or disappointed, to learn that Bad Shoes Festival is not about your embarrassing footwear.

Instead, it is collaboration between Bad Language Manchester and Shoe String Magazine, two budding young writery projects from Manchester. Their aim is to create an exciting, interactive arts festival that will bring all ages and lovers or all art forms together for one Sunday afternoon.

The event will take place on Sunday 25^th September from 12.30pm, in two venues across Chorlton, Manchester; Electrik and Dulicmer. The Dulcimer will be home to music and art exhibitions and just down the road, Electrik will host a spoken word stage, craft stalls and book stalls for you to spend your guilty Sunday pennies.

There will be secret interactive art projects, and writing competitions to get involved with throughout the day, and yes, there will indeed be bad shoes to be won.

If you wish to get involved or want to ask more questions, visit www.badshoesfestival.wordpress.com or e-mail badshoesfestival@gmail.com.

Applications from artists, musicians, zines and crafts people welcome.

The festival is free but does encourage donations.

Flash Language Literature Pub Quiz

Flash Mob and Bad Language have teamed up to take part in the Not Part Of festival and created a night of bookish questions to twist your nerdy brains! There will be questions, prizes and a few little surprises!

The quiz is £1 per person to enter and maximum team size is 6 people. You can register your interest at skiddle,facebook or just turn up on the night!

The Not Part Of festival was born in 2007 when Gareth McCann realised that what made Manchester International Festival unique, was that it was comprised of commissioned, curated work. Not Part Of is a festival for all creatives to take part in without the barriers. 


You can view the full programme for not part of here.

Flash Mob Writing Competition E- Book

OK so here it is - the e-book produced by Seabrook Associates with the full 12 shortlisted fictions from the Flash Mob Writing Competition. Go on and have a looksee...

The Literary Salon

I recently performed at the  live literary salon at Dulcimer in Chorlton as part of the Chorlton Arts Festival. The event was run by Flash Mob and involved readings from the judges, the shorlisted and special guest Nik Perring.

It was broadcast live on Chorlton FM so needless to say there were a lot of nerves in the air but I think that added to the quality of the night. The night followed a strict schedule which meant that sometimes the judges had to improvise to avoid dead air! Luckily they had corpses to read which the audience had put together in the breaks - A story built from writing a list of character, place, dialogue word by word as it is passed between people.


My favourite piece of the night, and ironically the winner was Socrates Adams with his flash fiction Water Pressure. The winner and two runners up had their poems illustrated by local artists and were presented with a framed version at the end of the night. 


I read my shortlisted flash fiction The Cracks which entails ominious cracks which appear over night in the earth and grow larger until they swallow half a city. This piece along with the other 11 shortlisted will soon be published in an e-book courtesy of Seabrook Associates which will appear on the Flash Mob website soon.

Electric Sky

So.... Exciting things that have been happening since I last blogged.....

Bad Language have the third anthology designed and complete and in the post! The title is Electric Sky after Fergus Evans poem The Hurricane. You can view a sneak peak of the front cover here, designed by local artist Laura Richardson. The book launch will take place on Wednesday 25th May at the usual venue of The Castle Hotel. You can invite yourself along here
. 
Flash Mob Writing Competition have announced their short list and I'm one of the 12! The other's shortlisted are here.

The winner and 2 runners up will be annouced at the Flash Mob Literary Salon next week on Thursday 26th May as part of Chorlton Arts Festival. The event will be broadcast live on Chorlton FM! Come and invite yourself along.

And one last exciting thing just to give you a good Saturday.... Tonight is the final night for Station Stories. Station Stories is a live literature performance taking place at Manchester Piccadilly station using digital technology and improvised electronic sound. Six writers read specifically comissioned stories to a private audience through headphones.  I'm going to the 7pm viewing which I think is the very last show so watch this space for an update.

Happy weekend everyone!