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Stories from the City is a collection of new writing about Liverpool: past, present and future. As Liverpool comes to the end of its year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, here is an alternative to both the populist and tourist-orientated ‘culture’ that has marked much of the year and the tide of miserable anti-2008 moaning, Stories from the City contains a myriad of voices and views from and on Liverpool and pulls no punches in its depiction of this most idiosyncratic of towns.

The included pieces were selected from an open submission process that was promoted across the city. A wide spectrum of writing looks hard and deep at Liverpool, the most written about in the UK after London and asks, for better or worse, what makes it special.

Written, designed, edited and produced locally and independently, Stories from the City will have its first 800 copies distributed free across Liverpool as a gift by its publishers, Redwood, for 2008. It includes writing by Shane Gladstone, Kath McKay, John Parker, Christopher Routledge, Michael Sellars, Joe Shooman, George Skelly, THIS WIRED GOD, Kenn Taylor, Maxwell Turpin and Tony Walsh.

“Stories from the City is an antidote to the avalanche of self-congratulatory crap that the city has produced in its Capital of Culture year. The writers within are interested in the only questions that matter: how we got to be here, in this place, at this time, and what it means to be alive in this city on this earth. Read, think, support. Liverpool needs work like this; it always has and always will. That there are people willing, even eager, to take such risks is to be praised.”
Niall Griffiths, award-winning Liverpool-born author

“A great book and a celebration of Liverpool’s greatest natural asset, namely language. This city loves words – we cherish them like connoisseurs and spend them like drunken sailors.”
Paul Du Noyer, Associate Editor of The Word, former editor of Q and Mojo and author of Liverpool: Wondrous Place.

Redwood is a Liverpool-based printing services and creative solutions company. It is the one of only a handful of printers across the UK to hold full environmental accreditation for both FSC and PEFC. Redwood act as publisher for a small range of titles and limit themselves to publications raising social awareness or promoting the arts.

Stories from the City is an independent creative collective founded by journalists Kenn Taylor (Flux, NME, The Big Issue) and Shane Gladstone (Dazed and Confused, Clash, Mercy) to undertake an open-submission creative writing project about Liverpool for 2008.

For any further press enquires about the Stories from the City project please contact: liverpoolmagazine<A T >gmail.com

For further enquires about Redwood please contact claire < A T > redwoodltd.co.uk

Stories from the City

ISBN Number: 978-0-9560557-3       Price: £5.95

The Reader Organisation, working with the Aspire Trust, opens an exhibition of photographs and artwork to showcase Wirral Community Shakespeare’s outstanding summer performances of The Winter’s Tale. The exhibition runs at Birkenhead Park Visitor Centre from 28th November to 6th December 2008 (10am – 4pm, Monday to Saturday).

From today, until 6th December, an exhibition of costumes, photographs and artwork is to be displayed in Birkenhead Park Visitor Centre to celebrate the wonderful achievement of all of those involved in Wirral Community Shakespeare. Costumes and props from the performance will be on show, as will photographs of rehearsals and the performances taken by Wallasey Amateur Photographic Society.

Also being exhibited is original artwork, inspired by the project, by artists Michelle Molyneux (photocollagist) and Joan Evans (graphic and visual artist). A DVD of the rehearsals and ‘behind the scenes’ action will be also be shown during the exhibition’s opening hours.

Running in conjunction with the Cornerstone Arts Festival, the English Department of Liverpool Hope University presents its own international literary festival. To contribute to the celebrations of Liverpool’s status as Cultural Capital of Europe, we are staging a number of renowned local writers, who will be reading from and discussing Liverpool in the literary imagination. The Festival also has invited internationally acclaimed writers.

On Thursday 27 November, the American writer Douglas Cowie will be reading from, and discussing, his rock’n'roll road novel Owen Noone and the Marauder, and addressing wider issues, such as the significance of the recent American elections.

Liverpool is a fascinating and complex story that is narrated above all by the poetry it inspires. On Wednesday 3rd December, two critically acclaimed poets who have connected place with voice, Eleanor Rees and Jean Sprackland, will read from their work and to discuss Liverpool as a place of the imagination.

Behind the celebrations of Liverpool as a glossy Cultural Capital of Europe, the erection of hotels that looks like ocean liners made out of glass, mega shopping malls, there exist a city of darkness, of oppression, of crime and squalor, of drugs and prostitution, of poverty, unemployment and reduced humanity. Niall Griffiths, Helen Walsh and Kevin Sampson have all experienced and written about this Liverpool. On Thursday 4 December they will read from their work and discuss the dark underworlds of Liverpool.

The Festival closes with a special event that involves the internationally renowned novelist and musician Amit Chaudhuri (A Strange and Sublime Address; A New World), who will perform his music project, ‘This is Not Fusion’, a hybrid mixture of jazz, blues, Indian folk music. The project has received raving reviews from critics and musicians around the world, praising its originality, inventiveness and vibrancy. Chaudhuri will also talk about how this project fits in with his writing, and read from his fiction.

All events take place at the Cornerstone Campus. For tickets and further information please visit the website or call the Box Office on 0151 291 3578.

The Readers’ Day, presented by The Reader Organisation and Liverpool Libraries, centred around three open audience events – a conversation with Frank Cottrell-Boyce and a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge led respectively by Jane Davis, as well as a very lively session when our two celebrated Liverpool authors conversed with each other about how their own experiences and memories of their home city may have influenced their writing in different ways and at different levels.

The day’s programme also included two lots of workshops. In the morning, readers had the choice to read and discuss Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s thought-provoking short story ‘Accelerate’, enjoy a discussion group on poems about work during the twentieth century, or participate in a reading session which took as its theme no other than the popular series Mersey Minis. In the afternoon, the range of choice remained just as diverse and exciting, with workshops being offered on the stories of city seafarers (a session led by no other than Frank senior), a reading group where people were asked to bring along with them poems that they would like to have with then if they were to fall victims to that unfortunate fate of being shipwrecked, and last but by no means least, the Readers’ Surgery, with Jane Davis, Angie Macmillan, the poet Rebecca Goss, and myself all trying to provide searching readers with a poem or a novel that would on some level act as a response to their particular needs or interests.

I was very pleased to see several of our Get Into Reading members on the day and all very keen to take the opportunity to relax and enjoy themselves. One of the most positive things that resulted from the day was that it has clearly made more people aware of Central Library and also encouraged more people to come into this vast public space. At the end of the day, one lady came up to me and said, ‘Do you know, I’m ashamed to say this, but I’ve never been in this library before – I never even knew it existed! And isn’t it lovely! I will be coming back here again – not just to borrow books mind you, but because I want to be able to walk round this room again (the Picton Library) – it really is beautiful!’

So once again, The Reader Organisation provides local people with a thoroughly enjoyably literary event that is relaxed and inclusive, informal and uplifting. Let’s hope that we can hold more of them at Central Library in future!

Posted by Clare Williams

In the autumn of 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke began working as secretary to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke was commissioned to write a monograph on the Worpswede artists and originally moved to Paris in order to watch Rodin at work. He would observe the artist working and despite only possessing minimal knowledge of the French language, would be talk to him for hours; he was astounded by the unfaltering attention to the minutiae of life that Rodin was dedicated to.

‘The Panther’ was written after Rodin encouraged Rilke (who had complained of not having written for some time) to visit the Jardins de Plantes to observe the animals there. If legend is to be believed, Rilke spent nine hours staring at a panther in its cage. The poem describes with the utmost clarity the physicality of the animal: firstly, in its entirety, how it moves and thinks; secondly, its broken down into parts (joints, eyes, etc.). The poem symbolises how, through its being encaged, the panther is taken apart and that finally it “is gone”.

The Panther
In the Jardins de Plantes, Paris

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly. An image enters in,

rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902

Edit:

TICKETS HAVE SOLD-OUT! To add your name to our ticket returns list please email events@thereader.org.uk  

Now in its fifth year, The Reader Organisation presents the annual Penny Readings, updating the hugely popular readings given by Charles Dickens in Liverpool in the 1840s. In a unique combination of music, dance, laughter, tears and great live readings, this is one unique Liverpool night out… for only one penny.

The Penny Readings will be in the Small Concert Room, St. George’s Hall on Sunday 7th December 2008. Doors open at 5.10pm and the performance will commence at 6pm.

For 2008 the world-famous actress Janet Suzman, renowned for her Shakespearean roles, will be joining us for the event. She will be taking her turn to read along with our very own Philip Davis (editor of The Reader magazine) and Liverpool literature-lover Brian Nellist.

It’s not just readings, there will also be performances by, amongst others: Daywalker (acoustic guitar and vocals), Kensington Choir, Sj Russell (performance poet extraordinaire), Somalifields (up-and-coming young Somali poets) and El Ghawazee (belly-dancers!).

Tickets for the Penny Readings 2008 are available from Liverpool Central Library (Second Floor Information Desk, tel: +44 151 233 5829) from Monday 24th November. Tickets are limited to two per person; please pay your penny on the door on the night. Please email events@thereader.org.uk if you have any queries.

Doors open at 5.10pm, please join us for tea and mince pies, have a shop at our second-hand bookstall and soak up the festive atmosphere in the foyer…

The arrival of e-book readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader has triggered a lot of discussion in the media and among bloggers about the future of the book and the ‘interesting’ state of the publishing industry. Reading a book on an electronic handheld device is a utilitarian act: I need something to read, but I don’t want to carry a hunking great hardback book around with me. Oddly enough, that was partly the thinking behind the invention of the paperback. I’m not convinced (yet) that one of these techno-readers will become my primary reading device any time soon, but I believe they are already changing the way publishers do business and I think in the long run mid-range paperbacks are an endangered species. It no longer works simply to ship any old atoms to sell bytes; they have to be the right kind of atoms and they have to be flying in the right formation.

Penguin’s recent release of leather-bound editions of books from the Penguin Classics range suggests the company is changing the formation of the atoms it ships and making an effort to move into a more tactile and emotive market. In fact they are selling the book itself rather than its content. These editions, at £50 each, look very lovely indeed, but they are not really the kind of thing you might sit down and actually read. They also have a whiff of good economic times past about them, which makes the inclusion of The Great Gatsby in the list rather more interesting. Fitzgerald’s role as the chronicler of a society heading for destruction has to some extent turned his books into historical curiosities. We wouldn’t be so stupid as to make those mistakes again, would we?

As with closets full of shirts, so there has always been room for boutique books. But I doubt Abigail’s Party is the image Penguin is looking for. In a world where day-to-day reading is increasingly done on a screen of some kind, real readers may well be prepared to pay more for high quality editions to read at home. But they will have to be robust and usable. Lower down the scale Everyman’s Library has been doing ‘value quality’ for over a century and may be about to issue the most patient ‘I told you so’ in publishing history. Penguin revolutionised publishing with its paperbacks in the 1930s. These catwalk classics are strictly for for the display cabinet.

Note: there was a server problem while this post was being edited so it originally appeared in a slightly different form. This may explain why email subscribers have received the post twice.

Posted by Chris Routledge

By Alison Walters

One of the sessions at Shipping Lines that fascinated me the most was the session by David and Helen Constantine. They are the current editors of Modern Poetry in Translation. Being a linguist myself, I was truly engrossed with what they had to say from start to finish. Modern Poetry in Translation is published twice a year and always has a different theme and emphasis. When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded MPT in 1966 they had two principal ambitions: to publish poetry that dealt truthfully with the real contemporary world, and to benefit writers and the reading public in Britain and America by confronting them with good work from abroad.

David and Helen both read a selection of poems from the journals and I was entranced by the diverse nature of the content of the magazine; they publish from all peoples, ethnicities and countries of the world. As well as those poets that are just starting, the magazine also publishes long-established poets and new translations of older works.

Modern Poetry in Translation’s aim is to publish translations, original poems and short essays that will address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, the speaking of languages outside the native home. They also want to widen and diversify the very idea of translation, and in that spirit they invite very free transformations and metamorphoses of all kinds: down the ages, across the frontiers and cultures, from one genre to another.

I know for sure they have one new subscriber!

— — —

David Constantine’s poetry and short fiction have been published in many issues of The Reader magazine  (most recently in The Reader 29 ‘Voices that Need to be Heard’). There will be more new poetry by David in The Reader published in the first issue of 2009 (The Reader 33, March 2009). You can subscribe here.

William Blake’s complementary collections of poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are brilliantly ambiguous. This introduction is on the face of it a celebration of innocence and of the need to capture it in art. Yet the moment at which the piper sits down to write his song in a book the child angel disappears and the clear water is ’stain’d’. In other words the poem, the song, the work of art, is incapable of communicating innocence as such, but it is all we have. Is this a song of innocence or of experience?

Introduction to Songs of Innocence

   Piping down the valleys wild,

     Piping songs of pleasant glee,

   On a cloud I saw a child,

     And he laughing said to me:

   “Pipe a song about a Lamb!”

     So I piped with merry cheer.

   “Piper, pipe that song again;”

     So I piped: he wept to hear.

   “Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

     Sing thy songs of happy cheer!”

   So I sang the same again,

     While he wept with joy to hear.

   “Piper, sit thee down and write

     In a book, that all may read.”

   So he vanish’d from my sight;

     And I pluck’d a hollow reed,

   And I made a rural pen,

     And I stain’d the water clear,

   And I wrote my happy songs

     Every child may joy to hear.