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The
Guardian Hay Festival 2004 - Women’s Textual Fantasies
ELIZABETH
WRITES:
On
Thursday 3rd June I read at the Guardian Hay Festival, at the invitation
of the Welsh women’s press Honno,
joining editors Janet Thomas and Catherine Merriman and Honno managing
editor and contributor Lindsay Ashford for the launch of two anthologies,
Mirror, Mirror and Laughing, Not Laughing.
Reading at Hay was quite an experience, and different from any other
reading I’ve ever done. Women’s Textual Fantasies was the
title given by the Hay programmers to our event, but the whole place
seemed to me one big textual fantasy: the strange, festive yet hushed
air among the flapping white tents, the genteel intentness of a
crowd obsessed to a man or woman by books; the way that as a writer
you are cosseted by sweet smiling minders who look as if they ought
more rightly to be at school or a rave. The strange sense they give
you that writing is something of supreme importance…
Our minder, Helen, led us sweetly down a curving road out of Hay
centre to what we had been told was a run-down community centre,
but looked like nothing less than a circus tent or party marquee,
hung out with snow-white awnings. The hall inside was a darkened
cave packed with a hushed and expectant audience, and set up with
a very slick stage and the most sophisticated sound system I’ve
ever encountered at a reading.
Janet Thomas began by talking about Honno’s commendable publishing
policy of providing for women from Wales a route into publishing
which the big houses now eschew, by producing volumes of short stories.
More specifically, she talked about Mirror, Mirror which
she had co-edited with Patricia Duncker, a fiction anthology on
the subject of the other woman. She and Patricia had been surprised
and delighted, she said, to find contributors interpreting the theme
in wide and innovative ways, so that the ‘other woman’ had turned
out in many stories to be not a mistress but someone quite other,
and in several stories a mother. Lindsay
Ashford, whose story had been one of these, then read us a very
moving extract.
Catherine Merriman had edited Laughing, Not Laughing, an
anthology of autobiographical pieces about women’s experience of
sex. She explained that her main aim had been to search for truthfulness
as a counter to the usual media angles of sensation and titillation,
and that she had also wanted to be inclusive - strategems which
have made the book stunningly honest and wide-ranging. Finally I
read an extract from my piece in this book, and for a brief moment,
in view of the nature of the content, found myself uncharacteristically
nervous.
There were intent and interested questions from the audience for
the editors, and it was clear that there were many writers there
eager for publishing information and opportunities.
Afterwards each of the four of us was presented with a huge white
rose, as if we were royalty, and there on the book-signing table
was a glass of champagne next to each signing pen.
And then it was time to drive away from such textual fantasy, to
leave the tents fluttering behind in the Wye valley, and get back
to the real world where such intense interest in books just isn’t
normal, and where being a writer means slogging away at a desk in
isolation and inviting pitying incomprehension at worst and tolerant
amusement at best.
Read
a press article about the event and the editor of Laughing
Not Laughing
Laughing
Not Laughing won
the publication category of the 2004 Erotic Awards
Link
to Honno
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