Joan Wilder vs Palpatine, and a weekend of London lit fests

It was so exciting last night to see two huge characters from my childhood on stage together: Kathleen Turner, who I will always think of first as romance novelist  Joan Wilder from Romancing the Stone, and Ian McDiarmid, the dreaded evil emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars movies. The play was Bakersfield Mist. Joan Wilder plays a boozy trailer park mom, and Palpatine is the snooty art expert who visits her to assess whether a painting she bought for three bucks in a yard sale is a genuine Jackson Pollock or not. The story rips through a series of twists in just 80 mins – the pace of the back and forth between Joan Wilder and Palpatine and the interval-less single-sitting format made it feel like a great short story. I loved it. It’s on till 30 August at the Duchess Theatre in London, if it sounds like your bag.

Seeing the play and eating Hong Kong barbecue in Chinatown was how Naomi and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary.

It was weird to come out of the theatre afterwards in daylight – it being the summer solstice, but it was a relief that the play was so concise, as I was absolutely exhausted after two days of literary festivals in London.

First was the Literary Kitchen Festival at The Peckham Pelican on Friday. On my way there, I met up with Alison MacLeod for cake and a catch-up at the RADA cafe, where we were serenaded by actor-folk practicing show-tunes on the cafe piano. From there, I headed to Peckham to read with Naomi Wood, Stuart Evers and Douglas Cowie. The Pelican stocked my favourite Kernel beer, and the crowd was warm.

 

I was having so much fun chatting after the gig that I didn’t notice the time, and that I was just about to miss my last train home. Thankfully, a friendly fellow offered to give me a lift to King’s Cross, and as we dashed through London, making my connection with two mins to spare, we chatted and I discovered that as well as being a samaratanical (yes, that is a real word from right now) taxi driver, he was the artist and illustrator Steven Appleby.

I’m a Pixies fan, so I was very excited to hear Steven talk about working with Black Francis on his graphic novel, The Good Inn, and about how he drew the little rockets on the back cover of the Trompe Le Monde album. I need to make a habit of nearly missing trains – this seems to be a back door for the universe to throw interesting adventures my way.

I got home at 1am, and had a few hours’ sleep before Bubba Schmell (my cat) woke me up at 5. Then it was time to get up and head back into London for the first London Short Story Festival.

When I arrived I was thrilled to see The Stone Thrower in the front window of Waterstones Piccadilly.

In the morning I did an event about weirdness in short stories with Rob Shearman and Dan Powell. Tania Hershman was our chair. The audience was big and had lots of great questions to ask. It was fun.

Afterwards, I had an hour to sign books and chat, do an interview for a film company who are doing a piece on the festival, eat a crisp-and-coffee-based lunch, get upstairs to the Waterstones HQ board room, and prep everything for my workshop on generating ideas. The group were lovely, and came up with lots of cracking ideas for short stories which I hope they’ll go off and write up. They also responded positively to the mind-bending sound experiment I’d put together specially. You never know how a new teaching experiment will go down, but I’m always advocating that writers take more risks, so I try to do the same thing with my occasional creative writing tutoring gigs too. This time, thankfully, I think it was a success.

The short story world is small, and as is always the case at festivals, there were so many folk I would love to have spent an hour chatting with over tea this weekend, but had instead to make do with two minutes sandwiched between hugs.

Thanks so much to Andrea Mason at the Literary Kitchen Festival, and Paul McVeigh at the London Short Story Festival for including me on their line-ups – I felt very lucky to be in the company of so many terrific writers and readers. And special thanks to the London Short Story Festival volunteers and Spread the Word team who were the loveliest, most helpful people in London this weekend, for sure.