May 2005
The May 1st Blue Room was a Bank Holiday Weekend Special, with outstanding guests, plus a quiz (with a literary theme, and a £20 book voucher for the winner!).
Star guest was 2005 Northern Rock Foundation Award winner Gillian Allnutt.
Gillian was born in London, but spent much of her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge and the University of Sussex. She has taught English and creative writing in London and Newcastle upon Tyne, and has also worked as a performer, publisher, journalist and freelance editor. She was a collective member of Sheba Feminist Publishers (1981-83), and from 1983 to 1988 was poetry editor at City Limits magazine.
In 2001/02 and 2002/03 she was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, partly at Newcastle University. Gillian has been teaching creative writing since 1983 - many Blue Room regulars have attended her Poetry Masterclasses at Newcastle University. She lives in Esh Winning, County Durham.
Gillian Allnutt has published six major poetry collections: Spitting the Pips Out (1981); Beginning the Avocado (1987); Blackthorn (1994); Nantucket and the Angel (1997); Lintel (2001); and her latest collection, Sojourner (2004). Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. She is also the co-editor of The New British Poetry, 1968-1988 (1988) and is the author of Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (1991).
We also had a short story from Ruth Henderson, who lives in North Shields where the River Tyne meets the North Sea. This landscape has influenced many of her award-winning short stories. Ruth was the first prize winner of the Biscuit Publishing Short Fiction Prize in 2001 with The Art of Living. She says:
"For many years my short stories were published in various magazines, but when I won the Biscuit prize in 2001 it gave me the confidence to be more ambitious, and I was delighted when the BBC accepted my stories; the latest can be heard on Sunday 22 May at 7.45 p.m. My book, The Other Side of the Tide was published in October 2004 and I won the Journal Short Story competition. I'm currently working on several historical sketches for English Heritage, to be performed at Tynemouth Castle in September and am more than half way into a full-length novel."
Her story A Sense of Place will be broadcast on Radio 4, as part of a series called Getting Away From It.
Vivien Jones read prose; she started writing for herself for the first time three years ago. Up until then she worked in alternative education where she taught Art & Design and Drama. When the University of Glasgow opened a campus in Dumfries, she went to university for the first time, aged 53. She is in the Honours year of her MA (Creative & Cultural Studies). Vivien's work has been published and performed right from the start with prose and drama as her chief focus.
In 2004 she had a site-specific play performed at Whithorn Priory and was short-listed for the Scotsman/Orange Short Story Prize. Also in 2004 she was part of a Poetry Doubles circuit where new writers are teamed with established writers for performance events. Vivien's double was Jacob Polley.
There will be more poetry from Carole Coates. Carole's first collection, The Goodbye Edition will be published in July by Shoestring Press. She has had work published in Orbis, Outposts, The Rialto, Acumen, The Devil, Staple, London Magazine, Envoi, New Welsh Review, The Interpreter's House, The Frogmore Papers and many other magazines and competitions including The Peterloo Anthology and The Arvon Competition Anthology (2004). She has also published critical writing. Carole is a member of SixPoets.
And Cath Tyler provided the music. She has been delving into traditional American music for the past 15 years. She started off learning to sing Sacred Harp music, a style based in community, with vibrant four-part harmonies. Cath helped form Northampton Harmony, a quartet which featured exhilarating raw harmony singing from early American sources. She learnt electric bass to join Cordelia's Dad. This band played loud rock and acoustic American music with a common thread of good storytelling, strong singing and talented musicianship. Cath developed her love of traditional music. The people she learned from and the songs she has learned have become integral to and integrated into all parts of her life.
She lives in Newcastle, works on an organic farm, teaches singing, plays solo shows, and gives concerts with her husband Phil.
All this, plus a Bank Holiday Weekend Quiz with a literary theme - and a £20 book voucher for the winner.
