Hold the front page! You could have knocked me down with a feather when, at around 13:45 yesterday, I had a call from Radio York wanting to interview me live on air in the evening. They wanted to talk about me, my podcast, and then play a little from one of the stories on it.
No such thing as bad press, right?
According to people who listened in, they felt it was fine. Personally I was – perhaps inevitably – a little disappointed: the 5 minutes passed very quickly, and I didn’t really get to say what I wanted to given their focus was very much on Walking Thru Fire. I only just managed to get a plug in for the Crash reading at the end! After I was done they played about a quarter of “Park’n’Ride”, my 2022 Swanwick competition-winning story. In the evening (at Ripon Writers’ Group) someone said that it hadn’t been enough; they had wanted more. Well I suppose that can’t be bad…
The Writers’ Group itself went really well. I’d set the task of writing ‘one poem to the tune of another’ i.e. taking a piece by WB Yeats and reimagining it as if written by Keats… I was worried we wouldn’t have many takers as it was quite a tough challenge. In the end we had eleven people at the meeting and twelve people who tried the challenge (a couple were emailed in). The ground we covered! From Sappho to Betjeman, Coleridge to Donne, Wordsworth to Pam Ayres! It was a splendid effort, and I think people got a lot out of the evening as well as trying the challenge. (My own was Betjeman’s “The Cottage Hospital” in the mash-up style of WH Auden and Dylan Thomas – forever known now as Dylan Auden!)
Anyway, back to earlier in the day… Between that 13:45 call and the interview there was another hour’s rehearsal of Crash with Andy. The performance is really coming on, and I can feel my relationship with the piece changing. I need to be more confident that I know more words by heart than I think I do.
So with that in mind, today will start with a full Crash run-through here in my study; it will also allow me to bed-in some of the things we worked on yesterday. Beyond that, I’ll do a little more on “C” I expect, plus I have a mentoring session with someone via Zoom after lunch.
Happy days!
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Ian Gouge - Writer & Publisher 