The hum in this heat is fat and languid as it falls on my desk making the ink in my pen run away run away away from the hum in this heat is now sticky and stodgy making me feel the fan broke in the hum in this heat in this heat belongs to the rich man who sings as he sinks in the sludge of a hum in a heat which will draw us all down poor rich old young for the hum in this heat is a siren not one wailing woo hoo! but a blonde in the guise of a botoxed beauty playing her songs while we sink into a hum in this heat.
The hum in this heat drones on and on and I smell the rot of the mango torn apart for its flesh and left to bake in the sun of the hum of this heat mango juices my neck smears my lips and the hairs of its stone clog the space ‘tween my teeth and I pull and I stretch and I suck the insides of its shell and I hum and I hum for all I can do is to hum in this heat.
And that´s what the heat did to me at a workshop run by Kathy Fish “to embrace my inner wild” at this year’s Bristol Flash Fiction Festival end June. I was lucky to get a bed at The Possum’s best mate’s and be chauffeured to and fro the fest each day. Ever grateful for that and may I come back next year?
More workshops played with my mind words, notably Dreams into Fiction with festival Director Jude Higgins, Viewing the World with Michelle Elvy and Christopher Allen, The Weird and Wonderful World of Flash with Vanessa Gebbie. Then there were talks on the Novella in Flash and the flash fiction sequence with Michael Loveday, as well as on publishing historical fiction with the editors of Flashback Fiction, interspersed with readings and yummy food and book loot, catching up with old writing mates, and meeting virtual ones in the flesh. Because I’m never where anything is or when there’s something the time’s not right, I’m always worried about not fitting in. A silly thing at my age, and I know it doesn’t show, but it’s still there, like the worry that the work won’t fit either and does everyone have to understand the words I do on the same levels which is why I think I’m falling in love with flash although I don’t really understand half of it.
To give you an idea of what I’m going on about, check out these videos:
Flash cabbie, Christopher Allen, hung out some Smokelong Shorts, so: Watch 1 with Nancy Stohlman, Watch 2 with Ingrid Jendrzejewski , Watch 3 with Meg Pokrass, Watch 4 with Santino Prinzi, Watch 5 with Dash Taylor and Watch 6 for some funny outtakes, if you dare.
In Bristol I met Nancy Stohlman with whom I did a super online workshop on the novel in flash in July and got some new stuff acooking that I hope will be done after the summer as something quite different, a sort of back to my roots of waxing episodic, and of course political in the past present of tenses.
My next will be all about friends and places, so until then, onwards!
Stop Press: more of Roppotucha’s creatures have been sighted!
