Jan Carson's Blog, page 20

The Orpheus Movements

Over the summer the Orpheus Ballroom will be��demolished as part of the Art College rebuild. Back in the day the Orpheus was one of the few dance halls in Belfast considered to be above repute and many of our Ulster Hall tea dancers have shared��great stories and memories with us about dancing on its sprung floor and falling in love over one of the ‘non-alcoholic’ beverages on offer at the Orpheus. I was delighted to be asked to write a piece based on this fantastic old ballroom. Tonight, it was wonderful to stand on the spot where the Orpheus stage had once been located and read the piece as part of a special tour organised by the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. Several people in the audience were former Orpheus attendees, back for a last look before the wrecking balls move in. I’m not sure what i’ll do with this piece now so if anyone has an interesting idea please let me know. Hope you enjoy.

The Orpheus Movements

This was not just an accident of name or geography. In the eighteenth century the Orpheus Inn stood here and then, later on the same site, the Orpheus Bar. Both of which served strong drink, for money. The Belfast Co-Operative Society, never one to miss a trick, passed over other perfectly good spots for the chance to sell liquor, fully licensed. They built up and out on the old site; three separate buildings, pieced together like a misfit jigsaw; hoped the customers wouldn���t catch on the seams. They included lifts, awnings, a department store and bank, tea rooms, toilets and on the top floor, crouching beneath the space where a roof top garden might have been, a ballroom which did not sell strong drink. Because of everything that had gone before they called this the Orpheus.


Orpheus a word uncommonly used in Belfast parlance. In a city full of John���s and solid, third generation Liam���s it is rare, even in these heady internet days, to stumble across a young Orpheus. Orpheus, a word derived from the Greek, taken from the hypothetical verb ���orphao��� meaning, ���to be deprived, to long for,��� as in, longing for a decent night out, as in, dying to kick your work week heels up and Jive. Also Orpheus, a word semantically close to ���goao��� meaning, ���to lament, sing wildly, cast a spell,��� as in, letting your hair down on the dance floor, as in, giving yon wee lassie in the corner a bit of the old eye. Orpheus, a word which transports you to another place, which is not Belfast, every time you say it.


From Rainer Maria Rilke���s ���Sonnets to Orpheus��� ���A refuge fashioned out of darkest longing/Entered, tremulo, the doorpost aquiver,/There you have fashioned them a temple for their hearing.��� And such a temple it was, also a refuge from the factories and the Shipyards and the Civil Service typing pool. A temple with vaulted ceiling and a view over Sailor Town, doors like windows, which for six shillings or less, might open into romance or a night out with the girls. Art deco flourishes on every corner and the silvered sounds of the bands and the young ones laughing which was a kind of worship in a kind of fashioned temple.


The congregation came in by the second entrance where the elevators were for it was miles to the top floor in heels. The Co-Op, canny as they were co-operative, employed young lads as Bell Hops to preach the virtue of the wood-panelled staircase and the stained glass windows at each landing. ���Good for the figure,��� they might have said, or, ���gets the blood going,��� while the bosses wished to funnel their customers like shoals of unspent fish through the various floors of fashion and other purchasable products.


The Co-Op kept safes on the third floor; enormous, iron-barred things like props from a John Wayne movie. The money from the purchasable products was stored here, on shelves, also the dance takings and the individual savings of thousands of Belfast residents, deposited weekly or fortnightly like tiny thank offerings to the gods of good sense. Later, when the art students arrived, with their white wash and their art house haircuts, these same safes stored supplies for the Jewellery Department. Raw gold and raw silver replaced hard-come-by pounds and well-stretched shillings and, despite their shine, were no more remarkable nor precious.


The dance floor was made from Canadian Maple and sprung so it breathed in time with the dancers; up and down as the beat demanded. In the Thirties it was more than willing to accommodate waltz and stiff-backed ballroom, barely breaking a sweat ���til the GIs descended upon its boards with their big boots and their clattering lust for Jive and Lindy Hop. For almost forty years the dance floor did not discriminate between one foot and the other. It rose and fell with well-polished enthusiasm and in a city better known for walls than floors, was a remarkable kind of thing to stand on.


There was a balcony at the South end of the Orpheus, hanging over the grand entrance. Occasionally just-married couples climbed the staircase to the top floor and peered over the balustrade to smile at the photographers below. Sometimes the public swapped places and it would be the photographer hanging over the balcony���s edge whilst dancing couples paused mid-Twist or diners, looked up from their prawn cocktail to raise a glass for the camera���s benefit. From such a height, the future could be seen, lumbering around the base of Cave Hill. Both photographer and subject understood that they were capturing history each time the flash went off.


When the Orpheus falls, its arched roof bending to meet its graceful sprung floor; the white wash lifting from its boards and moldings to reveal gold leaf glorying beneath; the windows singing out of their frames, in shrill high-pitched shards like a last dance hurrah to the good old days, looking back will be encouraged. For, this is not the underworld, this is Belfast and things are not lost which can be remembered.

(Special thanks to Stephen Sexton and Padraig Regan for supplementing my Ladybird version of Greek mythology with something a little more accurate).

Upcoming

I’ve got a few different wee gigs coming up over the next couple of weeks. They’re all very different and have given me some great opportunities/excuses to work with some really talented local writers and artists. I’m pretty excited about these events and would love to see a few friendly faces in the audience if anything here tickles your fancy.

Orpheus Project

Wednesday May 6th- 6pm

Art College, York Street

I’ll be reading a piece which I’ve written in response to the Orpheus Ballroom ahead of its demolition to facilitate the new Arts College building. I’ll be reading this piece as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival’s final tour of the Orpheus. The guided tour will be facilitated by Mike Catto and will also include live music and a performance from the Belle Hoppers dance troupe.

Open Roads, Lost Highways

Friday May 8th – 8pm

Roe Valley Arts Centre

As part of the Steinbeck Festival, (apparently Steinbeck’s Granda hailed from Limavady originally), I’ll be giving a hybrid kind of lecture/reading on the theme of the road in American Literature. The wonderful John Hewitt Society have facilitated this event and I’m sharing the stage with Scott Jamison from the band Go Wolf, who’ll be playing a selection of covers of American road songs. Looking forward to road tripping down to Limavady for this. If you fancy attending, tickets are available from the Roe Valley Arts Centre website http://www.roevalleyarts.com

Writers on Writers

Thursday May 14th 3pm

Linenhall Library

As part of the Linenhall Library’s excellent Writers on Writers festival I’ll be taking part in a panel presentation on how to get your short stories published. I’ll be joined by two great local novelist/short story writers, Bernie McGill and Kelly Creighton and we’re hoping the session will be informative, practical and light-hearted. Please come along if you’re looking for some honest advice on how to get published or have any questions pertaining to the topic. The session is free but the Linenhall Library would greatly appreciate it if you could book your place in advance at http://www.linenhall.com

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Seventeen

April 23rd 2015 ��� Ballymena

Marissa Kirk-Epstein and Brian Stromberg

Everyday at five Margaret walked the hundred yards or so to the postbox on the corner and posted a letter addressed to herself. Every morning at ten past nine the postman knocked on Margaret���s door and handed her one of these letters.

���Nice bit of weather, we���re having,��� he���d say, or, ���shocking cold for April.��� Often his was the only human voice Margaret would hear in a day, (aside, of course, from the television).

Inside each envelope was a folded paper with a smiley face printed on it. Held upside down this could also be a kind of sad face. It took two days for these letters to boomerang back to Margaret, three at the weekend.

April 24th 2015 ��� Ballymena

Christine O���Toole

On the twentieth day of toothache my mother takes me out for coffee. She has tea and a croissant. Coffee does not always mean coffee in provincial market towns. I eat my croissant on the left side of my mouth avoiding the spot where the world is ending again and again inside my tooth.

���You gave me toothache for nine straight months,��� my mother says. ���You took all the calcium and left me with nothing to chew on.���

I am not sure whether to apologize or point to the tooth five from the right, just before my molars begin, and say, ���penance,��� or, ���empathy,��� or something equating to, ���evens.���

April 25th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Jordan Sundberg

After some consideration she decides that it is not wrong to pray for the fictional characters from her favourite television shows to be well in life and love, to prosper financially, to be returned unto her, (should the BBC have seen fit to prematurely ax these characters). God is, after all, in the business of resurrection and one television doctor should prove less of a challenge than Lazarus or Jesus or any of the afflicted actuals. This, she concludes, should be something of a cakewalk, like that thing with the loaves and the fishes.

April 26th 2015 ��� Connswater Tesco, East Belfast

Trent and Marci DesChamps

Without so much as a ���save the date��� nod Connswater Tesco has closed its automatic doors, (which only ever opened from the inside out), dropped its rusty shutter and, for the last time, cleared its shelves of bulk buy nappies and fluorescent-coloured alcopops. It now looks like the Communist bread line it has always aspired to.

You are sad. You feel like the day you realized the Queen Mother was four years dead and you hadn���t been told. You had memories you wished to share with other Connswater shoppers: the time you asked for hummus and were offered a blank stare and then, an avocado, the time you accidentally shoplifted sweets and that one time you had the audacity to enquire after fresh basil.

All the romance is being sucked out of East Belfast.

April 27th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Julie Lee

I have become the sort of person who inserts emoticons into emails.

I have traditionally despised these sort of people. However, last week a good friend translated the classic W.B.Yeats poem, ���The Lake Isle of Innisfree,��� into three dozen or more lined emoticons: bees and trees and little cartoon men caught in the act of arising and going.

���If this is now what���s considered poetry,��� I said to myself, ���then I would be wise to embrace it sooner rather than later.���

I was not to be disappointed.

There were things which could be communicated by a moon-faced smiler or a yawning cat, which sat outside the boundaries of the English language. Though, in Japanese, I suspected there might be found an equivalent.

April 28th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Steve Stockman

His, ���making things out of nothing,��� exam had been the most frightful disaster. ���Seeing things that aren���t there,��� hadn���t been much better. And, as for, ���struggling to stand still in one place,��� well, he���d found his feet all too capable of holding themselves together like bricks or other permanent things.

He sat at his desk now, with three ordinary items lined on front of him ���a spoon, a matchbox and a spool of cotton thread- and wondered if he wished to pass or fail.

���What are they?��� asked the external examiner.

���A spoon, a matchbox and a spool of thread,��� he replied.

���Yes, but what could they be,��� continued the examiner, ���if you used your imagination?���

The memory of a tiny spool-shaped table and tiny people seated around it passed behind his eyelids, loose as kettle steam and dispersed before he could catch it. Also the idea of a matchbox bed, but this too would not stand still.

���A spoon, a matchbox, a spool of thread,��� he repeated.

���Failed,��� said the external examiner and with this he passed on the next stage which would involve grammar and politics and things which could be proven with measuring devices.

April 29th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Lois Kennedy

The last power ballad on the planet did not realize it was alone until it was too late. Behind its wet drums and its synthesizers and its particularly triumphant bass line it was impossible to hear anything else.

The last power ballad on the planet featured love and air punching and not giving up and everything being alright in the end. (In this, and other features, it was rather similar to all the other power ballads).

Listening to itself at high volume, in its own bedroom, the last power ballad on the planet began to feel its self-confidence return. It chanced a saxophone solo. This looked particularly good in the wardrobe mirror. It followed up with a key change.

���Nothing���s going stop us now,��� thought the last power ballad on the planet and then remembered that there was no longer an ���us��� in power balladry. This was too sad for synthesizers. There were not enough acoustic guitars in the world to compensate for its loss.

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Talented Friends 2: Emma Must

One week after her fabulous launch at No Alibis bookstore, I’ve finally had time to sit down with a cup of coffee and my copy of Emma Must’s debut pamphlet, Notes on the Use of the Austrian Scythe. Over the years, (I counted it up and I reckon it’s been almost four now), I’ve heard Emma read many, many times. She is one of those poets who draws the air back into a room as soon as she steps up to the mic. Every time she reads her work it feels like the roof lifts a little.

Despite my recent efforts with Anne Carson, poetry remains a difficult art for me. Most poems are so condensed, so very wordy, on first hearing I can’t help��focusing on the cadence, the way the words clash and flow, rather than what these words actually mean. Emma Must remains one of the very few poets whom I am able to appreciate without having first read their poems. Perhaps, this is because Emma is such an accomplished narrator. Perhaps it’s because she’s so very likeable, (great hair, great smile, great friend and wouldn’t I kill for that Radio 4 accent?) More likely it is because her poems walk that fine line between the infinite and the everyday accessible.

In Amygdala Must’s memory slides from a Moroccan holiday, to Silverstone, via a stint working on the Battenberg line at Mr Kipling’s to conclude with the rather heartbreaking admission, “I have no way of knowing yet/which parts of us I will recall/or when; what shape they will assume.” And I am just as captivated by the cake factory as I am with the way she approaches love and all those grander truths.

Before turning poet, Emma was a campaigner on environment and development issues, (I could tell you stories about her adventures as an activist, but i assure you they’d be much better heard straight from Emma herself, ideally with a large glass of white in the corner of Bar 12).��In these poems there’s a real sense that the land has never left Emma and yet they’re not the kind of hedge and field poems which usually bore me to tears. There’s a little of the Wendell Berry in how she deftly weaves relationships and important incidents through her images of nature��so people always seem to take precedent over plants. This is particularly apparent in the title poem, Notes on the Austrian Scythe, which begins, “You can no more lend a man your scythe/ than you can lend him your false teeth,/ so take my day instead, borrow this meadow.”

This is a beautiful first publication. I am extremely proud of Emma and glad that Templar chose to publish her pamphlet. It contains some of my all time favourite Emma Must poems, (the one about the Battenberg Cake, the cameo brooch one and that fantastic little poem about cheese). Please nip down to No Alibis and pick up a copy. Make sure you get Emma to sign it as I’ve no doubt this will be the first of many publications and someday a signed copy will be worth something substantial on Ebay.

Postcard Stories: Week Sixteen

April 16th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Erin Lynn

Things you are allowed to say to the poet Anne Carson, if your proper name is actually Julie Anne Carson:

You are half the woman I am.
We are a rhyming couplet, you and I.*
I also enjoy a well-placed appendices.
Sometimes, I like to read through your impressive list of accolades and substitute my name for yours.
You could well be my mother. This would have made everything a lot simpler for me; also more complicated.

��*Are we a rhyming couplet? I���m not what you���d call ���up��� on my poetic forms, Anne?

April 17th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Ariele Danea

Despite everything Gary had been led to believe, there was plenty of life on Mars. The stores were open seven days a week, even on public holidays, people of all ages cycled in designated cycling lanes and, in the suburbs and newly constituted urban villages of the capital, many people knew their neighbours personally and hung out at the weekends, grilling meat and drinking cold beer on the front porch. Team sports were still a really big deal on Mars, as was singing.

���It���s pretty neat here,��� Gary found himself saying to everyone he met ��� bartenders, baristas, little old ladies with fancy hair. ���It���s not at all what I���d expected.���

���Don���t tell them that when you get back to Earth,��� all the people on Mars said, quite adamantly. ���Tell them it���s red here and too warm, like Arizona. Otherwise, they move here and the property prices���ll go through the roof again.���

April 18th 2015 ��� Castlereagh Road, Belfast

Sarah Poots

Last night in the car, between one place and the other, the words ���Bob Dylan��� were spoken by an actor on Radio 4 at exactly the same second you were saying the words ���Bob��� and ���Dylan��� in the customary order.

This led to speculation about imperceivable radio waves, plagiarism and prophetic impulses. You wanted to see if the same phenomenon might occur a second time with different words and sat on in the car, listening. It didn���t.

This, you agreed was not a coincidence but not quite strange enough to sustain an entire novel, (like the football which fell out of the tree exactly at your feet or that thing with the hats outside Connswater).

���Small coincidences,��� you concluded, ���are just there to remind you that bigger coincidences are still possible.���

April 19th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Jonny Scott

In the autumn of last year we bought a fixer upper on the edge of Saintfield. Imagine our surprise when we received the keys to our ne home, only to discover that the house came with a cooker, washing machine and previous resident, installed in the living room.

At first we decorated around her avoiding the central section of the living room where the old lady had hunkered down with a year���s supply of ���The People���s Friend��� for distraction. Later, we would grow accustomed to her, call her Mags, (though we���d no idea of her given name), rest our drinks on her lap and lean against her while recounting our anecdotes at cocktail parties and informal soirees. She did not object nor seem particularly glad to be included.

���I���m not leaving,��� she���d say from time as if we were asking, or even insisting, ���it wouldn���t be home if I wasn���t there.���

April 20th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Jude Crozier

���You only think you���d have fancied Flannery O���Connor.

���Look at her,��� you say, pointing to her author photo on the back of Wise Blood. ���She was so cute. I���d totally have fancied her if I was alive back then.���

You are thinking of Flannery O���Connor as a lady in her early thirties with kooky vintage glasses and a hipster haircut, an immense eye for the well-fired sentence, and a thing for peacocks.

���You only think you���d have fancied Flannery O���Connor,��� I say.

In reality, which is not like the fly leaf of a novel, the Catholicism would have driven you mad, also the fact that she still lived with her mother at thirty. You would have had little sympathy with the lupus. You are not, after all, good with illness of any kind.

You would have expected Flannery O���Connor to be movie strange, as girls who write and keep blunt fringes are expected to be nowadays. Back then, Flannery O���Connor was just plain, ordinary strange and this would not have done for you at all.

April 21st 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Linda and Gary Craig

At night the mermaids gathered beneath the pier in clustered huddles. Their eyes, like cats���, could see in the dark. They did not need flashlights nor candles. They watched the parade of human feet through the lined holes in the boardwalk and, from time to time, commented upon this shoe or that in mermaid speak, (which was much like Braile, only quieter). Trainers. Flip Flops. Light summer brogues. The occasional naked foot, calloused from a beached childhood. Heels of all varieties; particularly the heels.

The mermaids bobbed around the pier posts like drunken apples and wished for feet which could be used for walking sometimes, but definitely heels. The good sense mermaid hung back with the jellyfish and the other unsociable types. She had no interest in feet or shoes, understanding as she did that most all of the world���s wonder was air or moving water and only accessible to those creatures with tails.

April 22nd 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Jacinta Morris

We wrote our individual lies on pieces of file paper. I was using a blue pen and he made me switch to black.

Then, he said, ���no, this will not do. We should type them out so we can���t tell the difference in handwriting.���

We typed the lies out in Times New Roman, cut them up and put them in the biscuit tin.

���Now,��� he said, ���you lift out eight separate lies and put them together. This will make a poem. It is called a cut up. William Burroughs did this to Rimbaud and other poets I���ve never heard of.���

We picked four lies each, keeping our eyes closed to avoid intention. He arranged them on the kitchen table. They did not look like a poem, lying there beside the fruit bowl, more like a shopping list.

���They���re still lies,��� I said, ���in any order, and I can tell which are mine so all that nonsense with typing was pointless.���

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Postcard Stories 2015: Week Fifteen

April 9th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Febe Armendariz

The next time someone asks me if I believe the Devil is real, I will not quote the Bible or fall back on personal experience. Instead, I will point to a hole in the back of my lower left molar, so sleight and insignificant the human eye would struggle to pick it out with binoculars, and I will say, (quite loudly, even if the room be quiet), ���you bet your bad mouth soul I believe the Devil���s real. There���s a hole in my tooth no bigger than a pin and the man himself���s been using it as a swing door these last three days; entering and leaving this world as he sees fit through a gap in the back of my tooth. And that, my Friend, is proof enough for me; it hurts too bad to be any sort of metaphor.���

April 10th 2015 ��� Bookfinders Caf��, Belfast

Ashley Anderson

Every March, at the end of the Financial Year, all the country���s unused emotions are gathered up in large, insulated containers and transported to the Scottish Highlands for safe disposal by properly trained experts.

During the six quick hours which form a boundary between March and April, extra Scottish lakes bloom between the hills, entirely comprised of unshed tears. The ghost children or every unborn laugh go howling across the glens and, in the spaces where one rock meets another, wasted love nestles down like clumps of prehistoric lichen and waits to meet its own extinction.

The next morning Britain will wake to an untapped reservoir of grand emotions and ruin itself afresh with all the possibilities available.

April 11th 2015 ��� Craigantlet Hills

Kym Condron

After some distance they came upon a clearing in the forest containing a kind of house or shelter made of smaller trees positioned against a larger tree. String, of the sort usually kept for binding parcels, had been used to tie the various branches together.

���Do you suppose it belongs to someone?��� she asked and he, employing the logic of all those who find first and subsequently keep, tossed their rucksacks through the door and clambered inside.

The space, once entered was deceptively large and contained a single sleeping bag, a toothbrush and a copy of Moby Dick, unread.

���Someone lives here,��� she said.

���Someone used to live here,��� he corrected for the sleeping bag was damp to the touch and the toothbrush feathered with fine spun spider webs.

Loneliness, they concluded, had driven the owner out the door and into the forest beyond. They were not as yet lonely in their togetherness and wondered if they might stay in this shelter forever, or an equally long time.

April 12th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Joy Dickinson

Which reminded her of camping, and that one evening in 1988 when they were not going on a proper holiday. So, instead, packed their tent into a duffel bag and walked three time round the housing estate to mimic distance. Then, camped for the night in the back garden, between the greenhouse and the bigger of the two flowerbeds, with a gas cooking stove and airbeds for all. And, upon waking the next morning heard the sound of next door���s cat, jingling, (for the neighbours kept Christmas bells strung around its collar like hazard lights), about the guy ropes, nosing for a way into the tent and the blue white cool box and the bacon rashers they were saving for breakfast.

April 13th 2015 ��� Albert Bridge Road, Belfast

Hannah Mill

At the junction where the Ravenhill Road meets the edge of the Albert Bridge, a well-dressed gentleman falls into step beside her. Heel to toe, heel to toe, lunch bags swinging like jealous metronomes they shoulder each other across the bridge and past the station. They do not speak, but she glances sideways from time to time, anxious not to fall behind his proud nose.

Reflected in the bus shelter���s gaze they are condiment bottles, cutlery, chess pieces; two items different, yet paired through association. People driving past in cars and buses will presume them a couple. She has not yet seen enough of him to decide whether this would be a good, or a ridiculous, thing.

They part ways outside the Market. Her cheek is cold and dry where he has not kissed her and later, at her desk, she wonders what she has not packed for his lunch. Tonight, she will couple another man across the Albert Bridge, or perhaps, if the lights are unduly cautious, a woman instead.

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April 14th 2015 ��� Lisburn Road, Belfast

Jude Hill

There was a child in the dentist���s waiting room. A boy, she presumed, for its hair was cut close to its head like a kind of fitted lampshade. She was too preoccupied to be sure. When she began to cry, because dentists scared her more than anything in the world- even God or the possibility of God���s absence- all the adults turned away from her purposefully like so many spoilt daffodils, straining into the sun. Only the child stared and the look on him was judgment, and the way a face will fall and then deliberately rise when it has won a thing it does not deserve.

April 15th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Cathy Quinn

Once a month, on a Friday, David Bowie takes a day off and is just a normal person. He drinks coffee for breakfast, vacuums the hall carpet and watches a few episodes of How I Met Your Mother on E4.

David Bowie values his days off. They make it much easier to continue being David Bowie for the remaining thirty odd days of the month.

In the past David Bowie often took advantage of his days off to visit the shopping mall or catch a movie at the cinema. However, the possibility of overhearing one of his own songs, and thus being reminded that he was still David Bowie, even on his day off, soon came to outweigh the enjoyment of leaving his house.

It was easier not to be David Bowie, he found, when other people weren���t looking at him.

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After Gunter Grass

Tomorrow I will enter my ninth consecutive day of toothache. This, before you all rush to point out, was wholly avoidable. If you don’t darken the door of a dentist for the better part of a decade and subsequently ignore those niggly not-quite-right pains in your jaw; those small particles of tooth, (probably just stray nuts), which appear in your half-chewed brownie; those increasingly common fever dreams where all your teeth fall out into your hand, mid-yawn; well, you’ve only really got yourself to blame for the pain.

I should have known much better and have now booked an appointment with a, (hopefully very understanding), dentist on the Lisburn Road. In the interim I’ve been self-medicating with cheap Rioja and Nurofen, nursing my throbbing jaw into the wee small hours and writing, writing, writing all through the night like that one man who wrote Confessions of an Opium Eater in a single drug-fuelled sitting. Strange things have been appearing between the lines of my stories this week and while this might be everything to do with the toothache and a little to do with Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (which I’ve been ploughing my way through before bed), I’m pretty glad to have my strange back. Things were going a little bit Irish literary fiction there for a while and it really didn’t suit me.

I’ve been writing seriously, (and by seriously I mean, on a lap top with labeled folders), for over ten years now. It took me a good��year before I felt confident enough to let anyone read anything I’d written. Even then I wasn’t sure whether my stories were genius, drivel or middle-of-the-road mediocre. I’m still not sure a decade later but from time to time I do let people read them. It’s useful to get feedback. Readers spot your flaws long before you do. The process keeps you humble, (or militantly��convinced that you’re just not picking the correct proof readers). However, the main thing I have learnt from various readers’ reactions over the years is that I don’t write “normal”. People tend to express this opinion with a varying level of tact; the level of tact directly correllated��to miles travelled from Ballymena town centre. There have been too many choice responses to list them all here but some of my favourites have included, “you’re a right weird one, aren’t you?” “sure, it’s not even proper writing,” and that old perennial, “I dread to think what’s going on inside your head.”

Now, we all know that��there is no such thing as a normal writer. Every story is a leap of imagination, an attempt to create something out of nothing or assume the character of someone you are not. This kind of imagination-driven outlook should, in my opinion, be considered normal but most often it’s not. The majority of “normal” people struggle to see beyond the next coffee break/stop light/Facebook update and have lost much of their capacity, or even inclination, for imagination. Writers imagine us out of the normal, into other possibilities and this is a very necessary gift. Therefore, every writer, every artist, no matter how straightforward or seemingly unoriginal, is at least a little bit abnormal.

There also exist, however, writers who are simply more abnormal than others. They do not want to write stories they’ve read before. They care not one jot for what sells only what should be written. They write the books which they themselves would wish to read if given the choice. They piss most people off and captivate the remaining few. They refuse to be subject to the rules of time, mortality, science or reason. They balk at the very notion of a linear plot line, laugh in the face of grammar and semantics, invent words, invent ways of understanding words, dispense with words all together and break into unbound imagery. They sometimes hit with devastating accuracy and sometimes miss the mark entirely and are not one inch diminished for continuing to try. They mock the tired bastions of politics, religion, sexuality and art and get shot for it. They clean make shit up; the sort of glorious shit which needs to be written down and read and revelled in. They are like children when they write but they are not innocent.

In my best and bravest moments as a writer I have aspired to be a similarly strange one. I have wished to write the kind of stories which give me heartbreak and goosebumps as a reader. Stories by writers like Richard Brautigan and Aimee Bender and Kurt Vonnegut and Karen Russell. The kind of writers who don’t make that much ordinary sense up close with a microscope, but from a distance with good humour, feel like somebody suddenly tore the roof off.

For the longest time I didn’t understand why I was writing the way I wrote and how, raised on a diet of Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, all this strangeness came to the surface every time I tried to string a paragraph together. Later, I would stumble across those authors already listed above and an unholy host of others, including poets, painters, theologians and musicians who somehow felt like that Biblical notion of the great cloud of witnesses passing on before, making the road seem just a little bit less lonely. Reading them, watching them, learning them, I came to feel a little more secure in my strangeness.

Three years ago during the first of many story-swapping coffees with Sinead Morrissey she leant across the table and said, quite urgently, “of course you’ve read The Tin Drum. Everything will make sense when you read The Tin Drum.” I hadn’t read The Tin Drum. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t even heard of it but I went straight out and bought it and read it and then read every other Gunter Grass novel I could get my hands on. After this I felt, for the first time, completely assured in my own enduring oddness and wished someone had pressed this book upon me at twenty one or twenty five or even thirty.�� (I also felt more jealous of another writer than I have ever been before or since).

This morning Gunter Grass died and I did not know him. He was old and German and I’m not sure I even realised he was still alive. I will never write anything as strange and marvellous as The Tin Drum. Those kind of novels are too remarkable to appear more than once in a lifetime and I suspect you must live through an��enormous time to have the capacity for such a book within you. But I still wanted to say something today. I wanted to say that I am thankful for Gunter Grass and all his precocious strangeness. I am, a slightly bolder writer for coming after him. I am grateful for the risks he took and the lightness with which he held terribly heavy truths. He was a brave man to write the things he wrote and a kind man to write them so eloquently. If you haven’t read any of his work please, please, please go and buy The Tin Drum tomorrow and stay up all night reading it, (ideally with a large glass of wine and no toothache). It will charm you and intimidate you and, if you are a writer, remind you why we do what we try to do with words.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Fourteen

April 2nd 2015 ��� Ballymena

Noah and Katie Locke

Tonight we are examining a family portrait taken to mark the exact moment at which my grandparents��� marriage turned forty. It hangs in the living room, bookended between pictures of previous cats. Note, if you will, the spider plant pedastaled behind the group and recently replaced with a plastic replica. Also my uncle in unfortunate black V-neck, his head floating like a ghost balloon against the dark brown backdrop. My mother, three years younger than my present self, in knee length tartan and blouse, perhaps borrowed from Margaret Thatcher, and my brother with scuffed knees and tight smirk barely concealing his absent front teeth. The carpet, which was all autumnal hues and hexagoned like a dead snakeskin; my hair, which was a helmet, even then. My younger cousin, in white summer frock, her guillotine black bangs already cut for a Chinese future. And, in the centre, like a thing upon which we are all leaning, my grandmother who is now gone.

April 3rd 2015 ��� Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Tom Stutzmann

Here is not quite Ireland proper/is not the Mainland/is certainly not Europe in the continental sense. This is particularly true on the Friday before Easter when alcohol may only be purchased, (legally), between the evening hours of five and eleven.

���Good Friday,��� the hard drinking men and women of Belfast are heard to exclaim around about last orders, ���tell me what���s so bloody good about it?��� (They say this every year as if they���ve only just thought of it).

The average Ulsterman is a stoic breed. Hardened by rain and other damp sorrows he has come to view life���s limits as a challenge.

Good Friday will only be good if he puts the effort in. He begins drinking at five and when the taps tighten against him takes his resolve outside to a bus shelter and consumes six cans of Coors Lite in less than an hour, pausing only to piss it out against a lamppost. By closing time he is a ghost of himself and it is no longer Good Friday and he cannot remember the word for resurrection.

April 4th 2015 ��� Ballymena

Becca Blevins

Spare a thought for those individuals currently in possession of a third level qualification in exploring. With no significant land mass left to discover they must settle for rediscovering cities already named and populated, for approaching known islands backwards, (most often in boats), and praying that the polar ice caps will melt revealing a yet-to-be-explored kingdom crouching just beneath the snow.

Many have already become archaeologists. Or, defeated by the mapped universe, some have resorted to the internet.

���While,��� they argue, ���the discovery of a cyber mountain is nothing in comparison to actual altitude, there is still the possibility of naming rites; the very real possibility of losing one���s self en route.���

They are sad, these would-be-Columbuses, and to be pitied like the dinosaurs in museums.

April 5th 2015 ��� Ballymena

Katy Campbell

Margaret watches crime dramas on ITV3: Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Foyle���s War, anything featuring Robson Greene. She drinks tea -several mugs per show- and keeps the remote control on her lap, red LED light turned to eye the screen directly. She watches approximately one hour and forty five minutes of each programme and then, mere seconds before the murderer is revealed, switches her television set off with a quick stab at the remote.

Margaret has her own suspicions and does not require confirmation or denial from any fictitious detective.

���What���s life without a wee bit of mystery?��� she says, ���sure who���d want to know all the answers?���

Margaret works in software programming. She does the same thing everyday with tea breaks. She is incapable of explaining exactly what she does to anyone outside her office. Sometimes Margaret feels like the world was already solved before she arrived on the scene.

April 6th 2015 ��� The Frosses

Keith Acheson

Easter Monday afternoon and everyone in Northern Ireland is attempting to find an isolated and scenic spot in which to eat their sandwiches. It takes two hours and twenty minutes from Ballymena to Portrush by car. For two of these hours you tail a silver Volkswagen. Two Labrador dogs monitor your mounting frustration through the rear window. They look happier than any of the people you pass at five miles per hour and slower. At The Frosses, where you were taught to hold your breath through the tunnel of trees, you decide, for once, not to. It takes thirty five minutes from first tree to last. This is much longer than you remember.

April 7th 2015 ��� Portrush

Kate Lewis- Mairs

Easter Tuesday and the East Strand has split itself, almost equally, in two. One brave half are realists in combat trouser and zip-up fleeces. They gather their children round a travel rug to eat chips and oily fish, straight from the paper. They carry gloves in their pockets, and hats, should the weather turn nasty. The other half still believe in caravan holidays. They lounge around in Primark shorts and flowery halters, already pinking. At midday they give their children a 99 from the ice cream van and a bottle of Lucozade, strip them to their underwear and send them off to court the North Sea. This is not considered child abuse in these parts though the temperature is just below 20 and tomorrow it will rain.

April 8th 2015 ��� Bedford Street, Belfast

Sarah Ashfield

���Today,��� she says, ���I saw a small version of you in Starbucks.���

���Small, like a child?��� John asks, picturing a three year old with his mustache.

���No, small, like a teaspoon or a hamster,��� she replies, ���look, I brought it with me to show you.���

She opens her handbag and removes a tiny replica of John, no bigger than a Star Wars figurine. The resemblance is uncanny; even the sweater is perfect.

The small version of John sits itself down. It does not say anything as it studies them both from the living room floor. She is unsure whether it is incapable of speech or simply shy in social settings.

���Can I keep it?��� asks John.

���Absolutely not,��� she replies and puts the tiny creature back inside her handbag. No good could possibly come of carrying a small version of yourself around town.

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Postcard Project 2015: Week 13

March 26th 2015 ��� Duke of York, Belfast

Graeme and Juste Kingston

Experimental guitarists are ten a penny in this town. One guy plays an acoustic with an electric fan; the hand held kind. Another guy uses forks and a third holds a plugged in hairdryer about half an inch from the strings of his guitar and moves it slowly round in a counter-clockwise direction. The noise he creates is roughly comparable to birds breathing. The guy who went at his Stratocaster with a chainsaw did not last long. He only had himself to blame.

���Too arty for his own good,��� said the critics in this town and took photos of the place where his hands had once been.

March 27th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Dan Bolger

I saw on Facebook that you have spent the weekend in Bournemouth. It is too early in the season for British seaside resorts and I cannot help but love you for choosing Bournemouth over other, more continental, cities. The snow has barely melted and there are only locals in the street, their skin tanned potato tough from that biting wind. The shops, which sell candy rock and novelty hats, have yet to raise their summer shutters. There is no ice cream to be had for love nor money.

In the pictures you are wearing a hat and scarf, two coats, (blanketed one on top of the other), and the mittens I gave you for Christmas last year. I hope they are joined together still, with string; the length of them snaking up one sleeve and down the other, circling your back where my arms used to meet.

March 28th 2015 ��� Boucher Road, Belfast

Ailish White

Having been sent to Homebase to buy a tin of white paint, (���for the hall, Love, just to take the look of dirt off it���), Michael found himself caught in a quandary of choice. He���d never before considered the possibility that white could come in so many various states, for wasn���t snow similar enough to paper and Colgate toothpaste?

Michael stood for an hour in the white paint aisle deliberating between forty different shades of pale: Snowdrop and Antique White, Porcelain, Papyrus and Cotton, something which was called Ghost White and seemed no more nor less ghostly than the tin stacked next to it.

���Sure, how far can you go wrong with white paint?��� he thought and bought Irish Linen only to discover that she had an entirely different shade of white in mind.

March 29th 2015 ��� The Lyric, Belfast

Sonya Campbell

In early 1963 the young Bob Dylan set out to write a song which would remind the North American public to adjust their alarm clocks and watches in accordance to the fickle whims of daylight savings.

Originally titled, ���Turn! Turn! Turn! (Your Clocks Back),��� it was quickly pointed out that this bore more than a passing resemblance to an old Pete Seeger song. After rejecting, ���Spring Forward, Fall Back,��� (which would not translate well with a European audience), Dylan settled upon ���The Times They Are A-Changin������. He hoped his song would be both informative and entertaining, not to mention lucrative. He foresaw tremendous radio potential at least twice a year.

However, this song, like every other song Dylan would come to write, had a wild mind of its own. It was not interested in falling back or springing forwards. It would content itself with nothing short of timelessness.

March 30th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Jon and Sarah Masters

She knew two songs about leaving, neither of which seemed entirely appropriate. They had already given him cake and a gift token for B&Q which he���d asked for specifically, (���seeing as he���d have plenty of time now for the garden.���) She���d signed the card; once for herself and once, with her left hand, for Martin in accounts who was in Tenerife this week with his wife. Still, she���d wanted to give him something special to remember her by now he was leaving. At last she settled upon the Sellotape dispenser for it was the only thing they���d held consistently in common these last seven years. She gave it to him, wrapped in last quarter���s financial report. She felt warm inside like a martyred saint. She would miss him now, every time she went next door for a length of tape.

March 31st 2015 ��� The Markets, Belfast

Cathy Cullen

There���s a child���s football wedged within the branches of a tree opposite St George���s Market. It is blue and patchwork yellow. As such it claims no particular allegiance to any local team. It���s been up there for months, sweating in the rain like a stuck cat.

Today the wind grabs it just as he walks beneath the tree, drops it like a dead thing at his feet. He considers kicking it into the morning traffic and can���t. The wind has no such scruples. It lifts the ball off the road, hurls it across three lanes of moving metal, straight under the wheels of a Translink bus. Afterward the ball is a pancake.

He stares at the blue and yellow mess of it interrupting the asphalt. He is thinking about the poor nurses from history class who survived the War only to die in a plane crash on the way home. ���Luck,��� he reminds himself solemnly, ���is a thing which swings both ways.���

April 1st 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Stephen Sexton

Books, and the substances I have recently spilled upon these books:-��

John Berryman ���77 Dream Songs.��� A full French press of medium roast which settled on the poems like black bog water and aged them in an instant.
Cormac McCarthy ���Blood Meridian.��� Three perfectly round drops of ranch dressing, blinking between the lines now like the blind eyes of very small creatures.
Leonora Carrington ���The Hearing Trumpet.��� One rather large cherry tomato, with seeds. This being the worst insult Padraig���s pristine copy has heard in the last five years. This, an irreversible statement like blood or guns or proper racism. Not to worry though. I have found the exact same copy, unsoiled and will swap them, one for another, so he never knows. Someone did this to me once, with hamsters.

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Postcard Project 2015: Week Twelve

March 19th 2015 ��� The Sunflower Bar, Belfast

Paul Maddern

The twinkle-eyed folk musician Liam Clancy died in 2009. His Aran jumper was made of sterner stuff and persisted well into the next decade. Entering the charity shop circuit in Cork it migrated North via Limerick and Roscommon to arrive in a Save the Children shop on Belfast���s Botanic Avenue just before Christmas 2014.

A young writer, hoping to look more poetic in cable knit cream, purchased the jumper, wore it to a reading of no real consequence in a local library and, though it itched like a prison blanket, refused to take it off. He imagined that the right kind of girls would take him more seriously in such a sweater. Besides, there was something of Clancy haunting every stitch of his pullover and, ghosted by the grip of songs he was too late to remember, the young writer found that his stories now came easier when sung loudly in low-roofed rooms.

March 20th 2015 ��� The Ulster Hall, Belfast

Chris Groskopf

My heart���s near broke with the old people. The dressed up good for dancing ones and the ones with yesterday���s dinner crumbed into their beards. The ones on sticks and zimmer frames, rolators and wheelchairs, (both acoustic and electric). The ones with eyes like broken cups, with teabag paper skin and a smell off them similar to damp flannels dried once too often. The ones who drink and fold the free sandwiches up in a clean hankie to keep for later in the zippered part of their handbags. Specifically the one with the cameo brooch pinned on upside down. And that one who sings Elvis Presley without cause or invitation, his voice folding and unfolding like an old-fashioned map. Also the one who could have been my grandmother if my grandmother was not already dead; who takes my hands in two of hers and cannot stop her teeth spitting out, ���shit. It���s a lovely day isn���t it? Shit. Shit. Shit.��� She is dressed up like a Sunday School picnic and my heart���s near broke with her.

March 21st 2015 ��� Amsterdam

Susan Harrison

Of all the books in the well-stocked bookshelf, the dog has chosen to sink its teeth into the hard backed cover of Hilary Mantel���s Booker Prize winning behemoth, ���Wolf Hall.��� Though the weight of English history is pitched heavily against him, not to mention seven hundred individual pages and Hilary herself, (who taketh no nonsense from man nor mongrel beast), the dog has devoured a substantial chunk of the book���s opening section. This, despite what they told you, filling in their ignorant gaps with the BBC television adaptation, is more than most human readers will manage.

March 22nd 2015 ��� Amsterdam

Emily Dedakis

In cinematography the Dutch angle is a type of shot where the camera is set at an angle so the image on screen appears tilted/slanted/slightly skewiff. The Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. The cobbled streets of Amsterdam contain more Dutch angles than any Hitchcock movie you���ve ever seen. And, while Pisa has its tower and in Belfast the Albert Clock leans South like a half cut sailor, these are isolated incidents; the only two buildings thus inclined in otherwise upright cities. Almost every house in Amsterdam is angled against gravity. They line the streets and the side streets like dominoes waiting to tip each other into the canal. Just passing these Dutch angles on bike or foot reminds you that the world itself is far from straight. You are not sure if this feeling equates to psychological uneasiness.

March 23rd 2015 ��� Amsterdam

Maria McManus

You are in the foyer of the Rijks Museum when you hear that the heart has finally fallen out of Belfast. You receive this information not by carrier pigeon or telegram, (both of which would seem the fitting vehicle), but rather by text message from a close friend. You are sitting down when the bad news arrives from far away. You are glad of this and also the marble beneath your backside; a cool, glossed reminder that some things are still permanent.

On the opposite side of the foyer Rembrandt glares from beneath the brim of his slouched hat. ���This is no fit place for hysterics,��� he says, ���though I���ve always found a gloomy disposition particularly charming.��� You can tell he���s known wars and other black losses.

Rembrandt is loud and close today, as is Mondrian and the good things you will eat for dinner. Belfast is far away and therefore smaller. This is universally known as perspective. You order wine with lunch and resolve to save your sadness for home when the bad news will be all you can see.

March 24th 2015 ��� Amsterdam

Lynda McClean

Wilhelm was almost seven when he first began to display symptoms of cyclophobia. He was, by this stage, old enough to know better but still too young to explain his distress. The fear, if he���d been cute enough to word it, might have sounded similar to appendicitis or other violent stomach complaints, including morning sickness.

During his early childhood Wilhelm had perched happily on the Y-shaped intersection where his father���s handlebars met, giggling and grinning as his teeth jittered on the more roughly cobbled streets. By eight the very sight of a bicycle chained outside the Vondelpark was enough to leave Wilhelm howling like an open sore. His father persisted with stabilizers, with tricycles and a small, wooden trailer not dissimilar to a horsebox, which he hitched to the back wheel of his own bicycle. Young Wilhelm refused to indulge any of these concessions.

���I shall walk,��� he said and his voice was unraveling around the edges. ���I shan���t even care if I am the only uncycling boy in Amsterdam and it takes me twice as long to get anywhere.���

And, in other cities, where the bicycles did not line the streets like spoked, metal sentries, this might well have worked.

March 25th 2015 ��� Greater Belfast

Tom Clarke

Two monkeys have escaped from Bellevue Zoo. They are small monkeys with lionesque faces, barely bigger than six week kittens. It is only a year since the last band of monkeys outwitted the fence. Upon reaching Cave Hill they had split to visit the Peace Wall, a local integrated and a mid-sized shopping centre on the outskirts of Glengormley. They had not purchased anything, (even food).

The zookeepers are not amused by this second act of defiance so close to the first. They are hunting the escaped monkeys with social media, with stun guns and an extra large bunch of bananas. They are like zookeepers from an early 90s movie.

Most of Belfast hopes the monkeys will escape capture. The possibility of a funny story running for weeks will make the sic o���clock news more bearable.

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