LIGHTSHIP LAUNCH

It’s a fair way from London to Hull so my husband and I (that sounds familiar) treated ourselves to a two day break with a couple of nights in a posh b & b.  The plan was for us to arrive at Middleton Hall Gallery, at the University of Hull, at around 5.15 pm.  I was to read my short story The Way to a Man’s Heart in front of a camera before the launch of the first ever Lightship Anthology and the prize giving.

Lightship Publishing is a new venture of Simon Kerr’s ‘to discover and mentor the best new literary voices from around the world.’   And that, apparently, included me!

The prize was a generous one but I would have joined the party at the university anyway.  It is all very well to write and to ‘be a writer’ but at some time an author has to bite the bullet and read his or her work in front of an audience, however daunting.

I had read a novel synopsis in public at a Spread the Word event in London and the Chichester MA programme offered all the students the chance to read to colleagues.  My other ‘secret weapon’ was that I had done some acting and at the age of ten my mother entered me for a talent competition which necessitated me reading the poem The King’s Breakfast  in our village hall.  I had won 2^nd prize.

However, this time I had won 1^st prize for my short story from a long list of 30.  The short list of 10 was to be published in the Lightship Anthology 1 by Alma Books and Lightship was about to give me a cheque for a thousand pounds.  In the audience, apart from other writers who had been short-listed, was Alessandro Gallenzi, the poet and translator of literary works and the founder of Alma Books, which maybe, one day, might publish my novel.  No pressure to read well, then.

Any nervousness I might have experienced was dispelled by our taxi arriving half-an-hour late and taking forty-five minutes to complete a 20 minute journey to the University.  The filming of the reading was cancelled; we retired to a pub to drink rum and coke.

In the Gallery, competitors and others were gathering.  Immediately we arrived, a dashing young Jamaican, dressed in a natty suit, the scarf around his neck draping to his knees, seduced me with the news that he had read my story and my blog, Being Rejected.  My blog?  How had he found that?  He smiled and waved an elegant hand decorated with two huge silver rings.  He had Googled me, of course.

I smiled back.  He was?  Roland Watson Grant, writer of the shortlisted story The Sketcher, who had just flown in from Jamaica.  This was his first visit to England and he had to fly right out again as his wife was to have a baby the next day.  We were amazed but delighted to meet him.

The winners of the poetry award and the flash fiction had made it to Hull but not the winner of the First Novel Chapter.  Never mind.  Simon’s introductory speech left us in no doubt that we were involved in the creation of a great new literary venture and we all vowed to enter our work again the following year.  The readings were delivered without a single hitch, Roland and a young woman called Kiare Ladner raising laughter as well as applause.  The other readers were Angela France, winner of the poetry prize, Peter Crockett winner of the flash fiction prize and Helen Holmes, shortlisted for her amusing flash fiction about a doomed budgerigar.

After more wine and chat, we were bussed to an Italian restaurant for dinner.  Alessandro being Italian, there was much light hearted banter about the food in my story and a tricky moment when he told me he’d personally checked all my Italian.  I didn’t ask if he had found any mistakes and he didn’t say.

The champagne flowed and the noise level grew.  I turned to the person sitting next to me, a good looking man with blond hair and a nice smile and asked his name.

‘Andrew Motion,’ he said.  And he was still smiling.

‘Of course you are,’ I said, like an idiot.

He turned back to the poetry winner for some sensible conversation about the art of real writing.

Not wanting either to get in the bad books of our hostess, or for this literary person I had become to change back into an ordinary wanna-be writer, we left the party at a quarter to midnight.

The next day I presented myself at the home of the cameraman for a filming of the entire story, 33 minutes in length.  It is, I understand, to be a pod cast on the Lightship web site.

We drove home via a weekend stay with friends living outside Oxford, the four of us indulging in more champagne, the excellent cooking of our hostess and a walk in the grounds of Baddesely Clinton, courtesy of the gracious giant poodle, Gracie.  The perfect conclusion to a few extraordinary days.

Anyone interested in either winning the 2012 Lightship competition with a short story, a poem, a flash fiction or the first chapter of a novel, visit the web site www.lightshippublishing.com.  Those of you wanting to read the work of the shortlisted writers, buy the book Lightship Anthology 1 published by Alma Books www.almabooks.com, available from Amazon.  

You’ll get a fantastic read and plenty of inspiration.