Let’s Talk About it - Dan Holloway

(That's me at the original launch. I find the key to readings is the 45 degree angle)

No, really. We’re all writers on this site, so we’re pretty used to sitting tapping and scratching till the words come out. But as we’re doing introductions this month, I thought I’d say something about what I love most in this storytelling business. Talking. Reading to a live audience. I say it a lot but as a writer you really can’t beat looking into an audience’s eyes and listening to their laughter and gasps as you lead them through the labyrinth of emotions that is a story.

I never really knew I’d love doing readings and shows. I’ve always been a bit of an exhibitionist. There was that time when we’d just got off the plane in Athens and I walked over the other side of the square so I’d be in the sight-line of a local news crew. And there was the phase when I’d go on any game show that would have me – Countdown, 15-1, Mastermind (Hannibal Lecter novels), Weakest Link, er, Brainteaser and pontificating on late night student radio.

(At the Covent Garden Poetry Cafe with Katelan Foisy, one of my writing - and all-around - heroes)

But I’d never really thought about reading stories to audiences. Until it came to the launch of the first book I self-published (this could have been a “why I self-publish” post, but the answer to that is rather short and not very interesting – I can’t imagine not. It’s two and a half years and five books since I sent out a query, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever send out another), and I realised I was going to have to read some of it. I’d recently been to a concert, a piano recital by a friend of mine, James Rhodes, who wears jeans and talks to the audience – and landed a multi-record deal with Warner for his combination of talent and fresh approach. I thought, “There’s something to that,” and decided to put on the kind of show you don’t normally get at a reading. I was lucky to have a local bookstore, Oxford’s Albion Beatnik, that was very cool with the whole thing. I made programme notes, invited a great musician, Jessie Grace, to play a set of her blues rock guitar, and wrote a performance piece, SKIN BOOK, to read alongside an extract from the novel, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall.

It was amazing. I was buzzing for days afterwards. The audience responded on such a personal level, and I felt that rehearsing and then reading gave me a much better handle on my own work. Combining it with music, turning a reading into a show worked too. That was November 2009. By February 2010, I was organising shows with the collective I’m part of, Year Zero Writers, with five writers and three bands. And I was getting pleasure out of writing I’d never had before. I found myself connected more closely to my readers. And I was writing poetry and short stories regularly, because they work best live. That in turn meant that I came to my novels feeling fresh. And with a sense of what would hold people’s attention, a feel for rhythm, a sense of pace and timing I’d never had before.

Most of all I was still getting that buzz. And it really is one of those things where one thing leads to another. As a group, we’ve done live shows at Rough Trade, at two galleries in Oxford and at the Covent Garden Poetry Café, and now we have a 12-writer show that we’ve put on to a sell-out crowd at Stoke Newington Literary Festival, and at Oxfringe, and we have what seems to have become an annual event called Not the Oxford Literary Festival. I’ve also found people asking me to do the most wonderful things. Last year I got to judge the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Competition and MC the winners’ night. And I’ve got to read at Brighton Fringe’s Grit Lit, at a marvellous show at Modern Art Oxford where 15 people working in different arts got 4 minutes each to respond to an art installation, and at Literary Death Match where…well, I’ve been told this is a family-friendly blog so I’ll just say “google is your friend.” And this summer I’m going to be putting on a show in Blackwell’s store in Oxford.

(Jessie Grace)

And the buzz just gets better. And your knowledge of your material gets deeper. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It’s where storytelling first came from. For me it’s what storytelling is about. Reaching deep deep inside yourself, scraping out what you find and dishing it up raw and still beating to a real life crowd.

Ooh, yes, and I write books :)

Black Heart High (book one of a dark paranormal romance series)

The Company of Fellows (imagine the Hannibal Lecter novels set in Oxford University. Voted Blackwell's favourite Oxford novel)

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes (a dissection of the power of the image in teh modern world)

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall (lyrical literary coming of age after Murakami's Norwegian Wood)

(life:) razorblades included (a collection of all my performance pieces)