Making Memories Together - What creative moments will stay with you forever? by Dan Holloway

          Today is National Flash Fiction Day. It would be fairly criminal of me not to state that from the outset. First off, this is the first time ever we’ve celebrated this marvellous form as a nation – the Arts Council have even got behind it. Second, tonight, as part of the shindig, we’re holding a flash slam in Oxford, combining the worlds of poetry slam and flash fiction as twelve of the UK’s finest practitioners battle it out, reading their stuff in front of an audience and celeb judge, the short fiction legend Tania Hershman. If you’re anywhere near Oxford, do come along to what will be a truly wonderful evening. And if you’re not, please do check out what’s going on in your area. Third, to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day, my two short fiction collections are free for today and tomorrow:

          (life:) razorblades included contains some award-winning short stories and poems with some adult content. Free in the UK and elsewhere

          Ode to Jouissance also has some award-winning shorts of a lyrical nature, exploring questions of ageing and identity in 20th century Europe. Free in the UK and elsewhere

          And whilst we’re on the subject of invitations, here is something to which I want to invite you all. My new poetry collection, Last Man Out of Eden, is out on June 12^th, and there will be an ebook (STOP PRESS: the ebook is available now for 99p HERE), but it’s performance poetry (below is a video of one my favourite poem from the book, Hungerford Bridge, performed in Gloucester earlier this month), so I’ll mainly be selling it at shows, and what better than a book with accompanying CD. And to make the CD, I’ll be holding a free recital of all 9 poems at The AlbionBeatnik in Oxfordon 8th June and recording the show. I hope it might be the chance to be part of something rather fun.

          Which brings me to the question and reminiscence part of the post. Don’t worry – I WILL get there!

 (with Katelan Foisy at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe)

          Last Man Out of Eden draws directly for many of its poems on my friendship with the writer and photographer Cody James and the writer, model, artist, and publisher Katelan Foisy, whom I met through Cody and with whom I collaborated on a wonderful event in Oxford this time in 2010, Lilith Burning, for which Katelan dressed as Lilith and whilst we walked around Oxford I took photos of people’s reactions to her. We made the photos into an artwork and invited everyone we’d pictured to a reading of stories based on the Lilith myth. I don’t think I can remember having my head pulled in so many wonderfully creative directions. Katelan was only in the UK for a few days before heading back to New York but it’s a creative relationship I am delighted to say is still going to this day.

          Katelan was in the UK primarily to launch her book Blood and Pudding, the story of her relationship with her childhood best friend, Holly. She’s an obsessive recorder, and during one glorious, sun-drenched, xanax-fuelled road trip she left tapes running the whole time, and the transcription of their conversations forms the majority of the book. The rest comprises anecdotes from the few years between that trip and Holly’s death from a heroin overdose. It is, without doubt, the most life affirming book I’ve ever read, the most unsentimental and beautiful celebration of a life (standing alongside that other great doyenne of New York art, Patti Smith and the exquisite Just Kids, the story of her ill-fated but wonderfully productive friendship with the late great Robert Mapplethorpe).

(Cody in San Francisco)

          My own brush with creative friendship and tragedy came through our Cody, who had introduced us. One of the most extraordinary moments of my literary life came when I performed a duet with her of her story Fifteen Minutes From the Golden Gate Bridge, one of many heartbreaking and coruscating pieces she has written based on her time in San Francisco in the 1990s, where meth addiction and schizophrenia nearly killed her. Thankfully it didn’t, and I have had the privilege of working with her for two years, and through two suicide attempts on her part. She is now so ill I don’t know if she will ever write again, but what we achieved in the time we had was remarkable. There is something transcendent about creative friendships, and Last Man Out of Eden is a celebration of that – and of the importance of living whilst we can. Many of the poems are about or for Cody, like Hungerford Bridge. And below is one I wrote for Katelan, simply called Holly. There are two quotations in the front of the book, one from each of them. Together they sum it up, and pay tribute to the three beautiful lives of Holly, Katelan, and Cody:

“sometimes we can’t make the world a better place, and there’s nothing to do but tell the truth” (Cody James)

“go out and live. And live. And go on living, because you never know when it’ll stop” (Katelan Foisy, Blood and Pudding)

          Which brings me to the question – what moments of your creative life will stay with you forever? Who set you on this path? Writing is often a solitary profession, but often it is only in the completely creatively safe space of the company of one special person who completely “gets” what we’re trying to do that we can truly explore and start to bloom. How about we spare a comment to remember someone special.

Holly

Just a road trip,

That’s what it seemed.

Two more teenage hipsters

Zipped on xanax

Paying lip service to the Kerouac dream.

Holly’s hands on the wheel

My feet on the dash

And the sun splashed

Our lips

And every rash decision

Slipped into our private mythology,

Major key rips in a minor key mixology.

We lived at 200 beats a minute.

I was drum and she was bass.

Life was numb and we chased

The sun from dawn to dusk,

The dust in our face.

The delirious race left us crazed

Till we spent days playing space invaders

On porn booth joysticks,

Placed every cent on black

Jacked up

And had infinities tattooed on our backs

To seal our Beatnik pact.

But Holly wasn’t so strong.

I think I’d known all along

She was no survivor

And now she was falling apart.

I tried to revive her

By making our lives into art.

I tried so hard

But her life was a shard that had stopped reflecting the light,

Her heart was the dark on a starless night.

I couldn’t keep her safe from harm,

I couldn’t be her lucky charm,

And when she placed it in my palm and pleaded

I couldn’t even put the needle in her arm.

Just a road trip,

In truth it’s already fading.

Her outline’s lost its shading.

Our friends have got desk jobs and jaded,

There’s little left of those two teenagers.

Kerouac and Cassady are someone else’s dream

And Ginsberg is their melody

But Holly is their theme.

 

Hungerford Bridge

Remember the day we lay under Hungerford Bridge

And London stopped, just for us?

Like balletic bullets in a John Woo film

We toured the stillness.

Skateboards and blades played our private soundtrack

Scored from the clacketing

Backbeats of the Thamesside track.

We played hopscotch on Bankside,

Poured pints of London Pride

And downed them on the docks in Rotherhithe,

Embraced in the space between Bridget Riley’s stripes,

Defaced the latest White Cube canvas hype

With lines of lust typed blind on absinthe

And declaimed them to the planeless skies from Trafalgar’s empty

            plinth.

Neon flared through our Soho lair

And electric reflections glared.

We spotted pimps and toms in strip joints coming up for air

And in clip joints frotted by despairing gimps and johns,

The silenced timpani of Dean Street’s daily song.

We stole tubes of lube and 90 percent proof,

Got pissed on Chelsea rooftops,

Fisted, lay on Wembley’s centre spot

And kissed till our lips were blistered

And our minds went missing.

We met them by the river.

An army of the alkies and the dispossessed,

The depressed, repressed, the not so easily impressed,

The inconsolable and unconfessed

Who repossessed their lives for just one night

Howling Baudelaire like loons

And raving by a quarter moon,

Piping crazy tunes across the water –

A glorious guttersnipe Brigadoon.

Forget the lazy days,

The backward gaze, the haze, the sugar glaze we paint upon our

            yesterdays.

We tattooed London in our veins,

Inked in electricity and linked up to the mains,

Its maze of urban arteries,

Its winding streets that bleed from us

Plying meths to find the key to us,

Suppress the lethargy that hides our dreams from us

That lies against our sighing breast to squeeze from us

The dying breaths that wheeze from us

And leak into a lullaby that pleads with us –

Remember the day we lay under Hungerford Bridge

And London stopped, just for us.