READeasy: 9th June

What It Is.

Hello aspiring writers! — whether you are a budding poet, novelist, scriptwriter, or haven’t yetmade up your mind, the Inky Fingers Writers’ Group is for YOU. We meet to read and talk about each other’s work in a fun, safe, and constructive environment. It is a unique (and free) opportunity to get feedback, to experience new writing, and to hear your work read aloud: and best of all, it is anonymous, so you can feel completely at ease.

How We Work.

• Every month a group of writers meets in the front room of the Forest Café to discuss their work. Each member submits a piece of writing for the group, these are anonymised and printed out, everyone is given one piece to read, and then we take turns reading the piece aloud and giving feedback.

• To attend for a session, just drop us an email at inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com, with a piece of your writing attached. Any genre, and extracts are certainly allowed, but the limit is about 500 words, so that we’ve time to read them all. Also, please use either .pdf, .odt or .doc (not .docx!) file formats.

• Come along on the night, and we will read each piece aloud and chat about it. (Let us know if you’re not going to be able to attend, so that we can make your space available to someone else.) Bring wine! Bring cake! Bring a notepad! Bring your wonderful mind!

• Places are limited, so please send your email a few days in advance to make sure you get a space. (Please note also, that only those who have submitted a piece themselves can come – if you want to just come and listen to amazing new writing, then please come to our Open Mic.)

• The discussion is really informal, so don’t feel you have to be an authority on literary criticism, or, well, on anything.

What Folk Have Said.

“I have always wanted to attend a group like this to share and get feedback on my work. However, I was always too nervous to share my work with so many other writers at one time. The Inky Fingers method is very good because it allows you to share your work anonymously, while still receiving feedback. I found it to be an excellent experience with lots of good discussion amongst a very nice bunch of people.”

“Great, very welcoming group!”

“This discussion gave me the confidence to get up at the next Inky Fingers open mic event and read one of my stories on stage, something I have never done before.”

“The atmosphere was great and the other authors present were an interesting bunch!”

Time and Place.

The second Thursday of every month, 6 – 9pm, in the Action Room of the Forest Café, Bristo Place.

Our next session will be Thursday 9th June.

Where the f*ck is Horwich?

Blog from Rachel on May’s Open Mic

It was windy oot and warm in on Tuesday evening for the monthly Inky Fingers Open Mic. The night was one of strong accents and dark voices, and a slight amount of winging it as one of our headlining acts, the delectable Catherine Brogan, was stuck on a slip road somewhere north of Manchester.

Cat’s in the midst of a poetry hitchike around the UK, and was finding the M6 none-too-friendly. With an eye on the phone screen for updates, we ploughed in with fine style, welcoming stories from featured performer Morag Edward and a full slate of Open Mic-ers.

Harry kicked things off by debuting two poems, including a devious little seduction posed from HBO’s The Wire begging us to ‘Click me’. (Although it turns out that Inky audiences – me included – are comprised more of Dr Who than Wire watchers, whatever that says about us).

Morag served up two lushly dark stories, one filled with gullshit spattered harbours and vanity in a fur pelt, the other with an elderly couple with a thoroughly unexpected selection of tools in their garden shed and an aversion to lentil pie.  She’ll be performing next Wednesday with Writer’s Bloc for their intriguing ‘Mr Big Society’ night at The Wee Red Bar.

We’ve been saying for a while at Inky HQ (which doesn’t exist  as a real place, by the way. Only in the sporadic flurries of excitement and activity in cyberspace, and fortnightly IRL in a huddled corner of Forest’s front room. Where we get excited and plan stuff. And oh my, but there is SUCH stuff coming up. And we’d like you to get involved, we really would.) that every month of Open Mic brings so much excitement. The diversity and standard of writing and performance in Edinburgh is inspiring, and we’re ever passionate about making sure that the opportunities exist for familiar and new faces to read their stuff.

On Tuesday, we were thrilled, delighted, repulsed, convulsed, touched and excited by: Tracey Rosenberg’s take on the difficulties of being an essential supporting companion in ‘Time Lord’s Job Advertisement’; Jake Lawy’s measured rhymes and sick shamanic verses; Louise Boyd (who wins for attention grabbing introductions by getting up on stage and delicately announcing that she really needed a wee) with a gruesome family heirloom; Alec Beattie’s lingering image of the ‘pavement glue’ that sticks those who stay in their hometowns; Morgan Halvorsen with a charming and charmed Thumbelina-sized taster of the Gynaecological Monologues, to be premiered at the Inky Finger Minifest in August; Keith Mackie causing Douglas Adams to roll over and sigh with a foul Glasgae version of Hitchhiker’s Guide; and Katherine McMahon tingling with icy autumn swims and a brinesoaked memory of childhood by the sea.

Second half, Cat let us know they were still on the road. We were able to link up some video footage of the hitchhike and her brilliant performances, then on with t’show…

Ever welcomed Inky return readers Caitlynn Cummings and Lindsay Ure lent their sultry tones to extracts from wider works-in-progress: Caitlynn with a wry, dry extract from ‘Gravestone Carver’ and Lindsay with a pitch perfect Deep South drawl taking us to a creekside campfire and a ravelling friendship.

First timers Livvi Walker and Sam Birchall gave us respective perspectives on a sensory plunge through a tangled dream, and meditations on Romantic ideals and sounds trapped behind the tongue. George Anderson’s story on dementia and Rat Pack memories in ‘No Wonder My Happy Heart Sings’ was at once heartbreakingly brutal and tender, and was followed by Rose Fraser waltzing us through a burlesque carnival of sweat and sex and lost innocence in polka dots. The night finished with Gavin Inglis chilling with South Pacific storms and faltering planes (so appropriate for the night), and then a irresistible afrobeat sendoff from Forest regulars Manje.

Phew.

See you next month…

R xx

PS: Cat & crew’s determined but ultimately doomed attempt to get from Manc to Ed in time. We’ll get you again, lass, and good luck with the rest of it, it’s a brilliant project.

ANNOUNCING: August Minifest – Callout!

Inky Fingers Edinburgh August Minifest

Callout for Performers

Calling writers, performers, poets, storytellers, spoken word artistes, linguistic experimenters, and everyone who cares about putting beautiful words in a beautiful order!

Inky Fingers, Edinburgh’s live-lit organising collective, are programming a spectacular wordly mini-fest at the Forest Café, 8th – 13th August 2011, and are looking for proposed events and readings from writers around the country.

Do you have an idea for a weird and wonderful word-related event? Do you have an awesome spoken word show you want to try out in Edinburgh? Do you have a show in Edinburgh already and would like a chance to promote it to wider audiences? Or are you just an awesome reader looking for a slot to perform at? We want to hear from you!

* * *

OUR REASONS FOR DOING THIS

• We want to have a space for spoken word &c in the August festivals that is free and liberated;
• We want to programme a balance of local writers/performers and folk from further afield, so that local writers can reach a Festivals audience and incoming writers/performers can connect to the local scene;
• At Forest we’ve got access to some great audiences, and we want people with funky ideas for spoken word &c to be able to reach them;

HOW THE ECONOMICS WORK

• Forest is a free venue. Audiences don’t pay to get in, and performers don’t pay to hire it.
• We provide the venue, the equipment, tech support, online and (some) print publicity you provide yourself, a good idea, and energy to make the mini-fest a success.
• You can ask for donations during your performance to help cover your costs; we cover our costs through booze and food sales

HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

• We have quite a few “lunchtime readings” slots on offer, which will be divided equally between local and incoming performers. To apply for a half hour slot, just tell us who you are, what you do, and what your experience is.
• We have a few slots for afternoon and evening shows. On no more than one A4 page, tell us who you are, what your idea is, what your time and tech requirements are, whether your show has been performed elsewhere before (or during the festival), what your experience is, and anything else you think we ought to know.
• We also have the energy and space to support really wild ideas. Got one of these? Pitch it to us in whatever way you think best.
• Any and all of the above should be emailed to inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com by 10th June at the latest. Programming decisions will be finalised by mid-to-late June.

A WORD OF WARNING

• We’re expecting a lot of proposals, but we only have six days to programme for this initial minifest experiment. We won’t be able to programme everybody. We won’t even be able to programme every great idea we receive or awesome person who contacts us. Our decisions will be based on gut instinct and various chance factors. We’ll try and do right by you, but we’re doing this for free and in our spare time, so be nice to us. And hey, even if we can’t programme you, we’ll be running quite a few open mics and we’d love to see you there.

ABOUT THE ORGANISERS

• Inky Fingers (http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com) is an unfunded grassroots organising collective. We run monthly open mics and workshops in Edinburgh, as wellas various special events. We care about supporting new writers, and providing a space for people to speak out, to work on their writing and performing, and to enjoy a community of writers and performers.
• The Forest Café (http://www.theforest.org.uk) is an independent arts-events-food-social-chaos-space in Edinburgh. We provide free and open events spaces for literally anyone to come and perform in, and we also have loads of amazing projects — like an art gallery, a publishing house, an award-winning experimental performance festival. We run on volunteer power, and we like a good party.

* * *

That’s all! Any questions, e-mail inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com. Please feel free to forward this callout to anyone you think would be interested.

May Open Mic: Catherine Brogan’s Poetry Hitchhike

INKY FINGERS OPEN MIC
featuring CATHERINE BROGAN and MORAG EDWARD
and YOU, on our famous open stage

Tuesday 24th May, 8 – 11pm
Forest Café, Bristo Place, Edinburgh
FREE

The Inky Fingers Open Mic takes place in the main room of the Forest Café every fourth Tuesday of the month, from 8-11pm. It’s free to come and free for anyone to perform, regardless of style, experience, or identity. It is big and celebratory and welcoming and fun. We want to hear from everybody. We want your poems, your rants, your ballads, your short stories, your diaries, your experimental texts, your heart, your mind, your body. We want the essay on your summer holidays you wrote when you were four, your adolescent haiku, and extracts from your eventually-to-be-completed epic fantasy quadrilogy. We want to hear your best new work as well. And we want people to care about the way words are performed.

Our feature performers this month are Irish performance poet Catherine Brogan, whose searing political verses have wowed audiences across Europe, and Edinburgh storyteller Morag Edward, who has been seen at performances from the Victoria & Albert Museum to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We’re especially excited to be part of Catherine Brogan’s Poetry Hitchhike: she’ll be hitchhiking and performing across the UK all month, accompanied by a film crew who’ll be pod- and video-casting her exploits online, along with interviews with and performances from the writers she meets along the way.

Open Mic slots are five minutes long; e-mail inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com to sign up and be sure of a slot!

Find Inky Fingers online at http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101994993200164, and on Twitter @InkyFingersEdin.

Open Mic slots are five minutes long; e-mail inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com to sign up and be sure of a slot!

Find Inky Fingers online at http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101994993200164, and on Twitter @InkyFingersEdin.