Fiction's just another word for lies

A couple of weeks ago, I performed at the John Rylands Library, a beautiful neo-Gothic library with some of the best secular stained glass in Manchester.

It was an exceptional night run by First Draft & by the John Rylands. I was really excited to be one of the folks invited to perform.

The library has an enormous collection - and a lot of it is stuff that's never been catalogued.

They made a small bit of it, a part called the EL Burney collection, available for First Draft's performers to view. The EL Burney collection was all stuff collected by Isabella Banks, a 19th century English novelist who was born in Manchester.

The collection itself was strange - a bit of plant plucked from Washington's tomb, a bit of cloth from Empress Josephine's boudoir, a bit of cloth from Napoleon's tomb, a braid of hair from a Fijian islander, a shell purse, a metal stamp, a Russian wooden spoon. A collection, yes - but there was no apparent focus to it, not like, say, a stamp collection. It was just a bunch of things.

We were supposed to respond to the collection, with a performance of some kind.

Photo by Phil Benbow

I wrote up a short blog post about my performance for First Draft after the event - you can read it here: https://firstdraftmcr.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/isabella/

And here's another view on the event, from my lovely, brilliant friend Dave Hartley, which really explores the borders between fiction and lying. Is fiction lies? Are all stories lies? Can we say anything that isn't actually a lie, in some shape or form? http://davidhartleywriter.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/therein-lies-story.html

At Dalal-Small Towers, we're getting ready for our Atlanta Wedding Celebration - it's very exciting to think that soon we'll be in Atlanta.