To mark Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief’s Good Death Week, INTERROBANG‽ is joined by some of the most enjoyable writers and performers around to present a new show, Live and Let Die.
So, INTERROBANG‽ thought, what a great bunch of folks to ask some Death Café-style questions, right‽ RIGHT!!!
First up – Jay Whittaker
For example, Ricky Interrobang attended the launch of Jay Whittaker’s brilliant first full-length collection, Wristwatch last year. The poems Jay shared that evening brushed up against death and grief and brushes with death and many other things, so she’s the perfect guest to kick off our virtual Death Café…
It’s been one heck of a time since our last regular INTERROBANG?! event.
Did we mention this?!
We were voted Best Regular Spoken Word Night at the 2017 Saboteur Awards.
We had the huge pleasure of presenting our collaborative single-story night Ghosts of the Citadel at the Hidden Door Festival.
Some other things happened, too.
Eh? Wot?!
And some grimmer stuff, as well.
So, come bury your head in the sand with your hosts BETH COCHRANE and RICKY MONAHAN BROWN and Edinburgh’s greatest living writer of the volunteer-perfomed, two-handed, comedic playlet, JACQUES TSIANTAR, as the very slightly naughty, Saboteur Award-winning INTERROBANG?! returns to the Biscuit Factory for an afternoon of storytelling, creative non-fiction and music, possibly with a small side of teeth-gnashing and farmer-bothering.
• JEN MCGREGOR is an Edinburgh-dwelling Dundonian raised by Glaswegians. Her plays have appeared at the Piccolo Theatre in Milan, the Traverse, and the Festival Castel dei Mondi. She has been published by New Writing Scotland, Bare Fiction, and 404 Ink.
• BECCA INGLIS is a creative non-fiction writer and theatre reviewer based in Edinburgh. Her essay Love in a Time of Melancholia appeared in 404 Ink’s collection Nasty Women, and her article When Women Steal the Patriarchy’s Toys: Feminism as Terrorism was published by the Dangerous Women Project. Becca has also blogged for Hollaback!, Linguisticator, and Lunar Poetry.
• JONATHA KOTTLER is from Albuquerque, NM where she was a lecturer at The University of New Mexico. She is a happy member of Edinburgh’s Write Like A Grrrl community and runs a reading and writing group for the local charity ECAS. She read a piece at Story Shop in the EIBF 2016, has an essay in 404 Ink’s Nasty Women, and has written for The Guardian.
• THE DIRTY LIES are a Scottish alternative group whose influences include Can, Radiohead and The Velvet Underground. Their guiter-laden sound is infused with synth noise, electronic drums and jazz. Blurring the line between indie and electronica, they have been steadily making a name for themselves in the Lowlands following 6 Music airplay with their debut EP, Release, and followup Cellophane. Their live set is raucous and expansive, while embedded with delicate harmonies. “It’s all about good tunes, tight playing, a real sense of dynamics and a walk on the dark side” – John Robb, Louder Than War.
Interrobang and The Ogilvie‘s A New World?! is only days away, so we thought we’d titillate your literary senses and bring to you the next tall glass of talent on Friday’s lineup. And here he is – Scottish Book Trust Award winning Simon Brown.
Photograph by ROB MCDOUGALL www.RobMcDougall.com 07856222103 info@robmcdougall.com
Originally from the Highlands, Simon Brown now lives in Edinburgh. He’s been published in 404 Ink and recently won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award. He’s currently trying to squeeze out his third novel.
?!: It’s time for A New World. What Earth-shattering thing would you invent to usher it in?
A giant anti-human prophylactic because we’d probably fuck it up if we were allowed in.
?!: But if we’re stuck in this world for now, where in it would you like to visit to experience a sense of renewal?
I’d love to see Lalibela in Ethiopia, where they have these churches they carved out of the rock.
?!: And what’s the most vivid representation of a new world that you’ve seen on page or screen?
The Road. It’s such an atmospheric, claustrophobic read and I can’t wait to see how accurate it turns out to be.
?!: Antonín Dvořák thought the New World sounded like his ninth symphony. But what music is playing as your new world crashes into existence?
You’d want the first song everyone heard to be memorable, so probably Mr. Bungle. But if we couldn’t get the appropriate public performance licences, then I’d be more than happy to strum the only two chords I know on guitar.
Thanks for that, Simon?!
?!: Finally (and without giving too much away!) what can you tell us about what you’ll be sharing at A New World?!
It’s about a farmer tending to some unusual crops.
Here at Interrobang we’re all about unusual crops. We wonder if Simon will bring us along some unusual snacks?! Only one way to find out. Come along to Interrobang and The Ogilvie’s: A New World, this Friday 7th April, 7pm at The Biscuit Factory.
You can get tickets on the door, or make it easy on yourself by getting them up front at Eventbrite.
They say You Can’t Go Back Again, but with the help of a full house at Woodland Creatures, we proved them wrong, didn’t we?!
Quick, moar booz!
Thanks to our brilliant featured guests, Allyson Stack, Daniel Shand, and Elise Hadgraft, for helping us avoid the dreaded “difficult second album” syndrome. Thanks to our excellent volunteer performers. And thanks to our intrepid “Edith” and “Harry” for submitting to Jacques’ Big Two-Hander.
Thanks again to our co-Interrobanger Jacques Tsiantar for guiding Edith and Harry through our recurring bit, and for handling the sound desk. Thanks also to Ricky’s bandmates in Nerd Bait, Stephanie and Paul, for providing music at the last minute when Katharine Macfarlane couldn’t join us through illness. We’re really looking forward to having her for series 2! And thanks to our good pal, Tonsy for these awesome photos! And finally, thanks to the folks at Woodland Creatures for taking such good care of all of us.
Harry and Edith, happy we’re all going to get to do this AGAIN
Most of all, thanks to our audience for equaling the enthusiasm displayed at the INTERROBANG?! premiere!
As announced at the show, the next INTERROBANG?! is going to be a very special festive episode. Bring your loudest voices, your Christmas jumpers, and five minutes of your own material on… what?! Keep checking in here, and on our Twitter or Facebook for more details as they emerge. It’s going to be super-exciting, and we can’t wait to share it all with you!
As the most important day of the cycle approaches, INTERROBANG?! is keeping its ground game strong and putting in a last big push. The latest of our featured guests for Interrobang – You Can’t Go Back Again, Elise Hadgraft, has taken a few minutes to complete The Interrobang Interrogation. Let’s find out more…
Elise Hadgraft is a Mancunian mother by day self-appointed ‘punk rock poet’ by night…..unless it’s an afternoon gig, she’s adaptable like that. She started writing poetry to impress boys sometime around 2008 and found herself spending several sorry years on the literary naughty step for her trouble. Having passed for suitably contrite she’s, of late, been allowed back out to terrorise the neighbourhood with questionable rhyme schemes and no solid grasp of punctuation.
Here’s how Elise answered our questions:
?!: The theme of Interrobang #2 is You Can’t Go Back Again. Is there anywhere you can’t go back again?
EH: Oh, multiple places. Most recently I found myself chucked out of the Manchester Northern Soul scene for being slightly peeved when some mad bugger threw my fella down the stairs…let’s just leave it at “you should’ve see the other guy.”
?!: And where would you like to go for the first time?
EH: I’m too skint to contemplate much in the way of travel, though (and don’t ask me how I put it off for 26 years) I went to Sheffield for the first time last month and had a bit of a Brutalist fangirl moment outside my favourite building.
?!: What song would you like as your entry music? Or should we just choose something?
EH: Anything by Pulp. Except Common People.
“Mother, I can never go home again…”
?!: What are your favourite and least favourite words?
EH: I cannot abide the word ‘moist’. Any word that is not ‘moist’ is a potential contender for favourite.
?!: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
EH: My bag of sweets, it’s in the back of this van full of puppies…
Thanks a lot to Elise for indulging Interrobang’s Interrogation. Come along to Interrobang – You Can’t Go Back Again on 4th November and she’ll slam you black and blue – no stairs required!
The first of our featured guests for Interrobang – You Can’t Go Back Again, Allyson Stack, has taken a few minutes to complete The Interrobang Interrogation. Let’s find out more…
Allyson’s interrogation begins
Allyson Stack was educated at Yale, Arizona State and has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She is a former screenwriter and now teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals in the US and UK and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her acclaimed 2016 novel, Under the Heartless Blue is available from Freight Books.
And here’s how she answered our questions:
?!: The theme of Interrobang #2 is You Can’t Go Back Again. Is there anywhere you can’t go back again?
AS: BEING CHILDLESS—i.e., to never having been a mum.
?!: And where would you like to go for the first time?
AS: INDIA.
?!: What song would you like as your entry music? Or should we just choose something?
AS: JUST CHOOSE SOMETHING.
?!: Here’s what we’ve chosen. Maybe Allyson will let us know on 4th November why it is – or isn’t – appropriate…
?!: What are your favourite and least favourite words?
AS: CAN’T CHOOSE FAVOURITES. IT WOULD BE LIKE PICKING A FAVOURITE CHILD.
?!: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
…
Thanks a lot to Allyson for indulging Interrobang’s Interrogation. Come along to Interrobang – You Can’t Go Back Again on 4th November and find out whether whether we’ve picked the right tune!
After a riotous First Time, and the great reception we received for our set at the Oxjam Festival, INTERROBANG?! is back again on 4th November with…
..INTERROBANG: You Can’t Go Back Again?! – Woodland Creatures, 7pm
As veterans of the first show will know, INTERROBANG?! is democratic spoken word & music and meritocratic prizes. It’s a land of exclamation and question making and all the nuances in between.
Interrobang 0.2 is four more invited and established writers and performers, as well as three audience members who have brought along 5 minutes of material and been pulled out of the hat. And the return of Novella Award Nominee JACQUES TSIANTAR and JACQUES’ BIG TWO-HANDER! They’ll all be entertaining us on the topic YOU CAN’T GO BACK AGAIN.
He’ll be there!
Your hosts Beth Cochrane and Ricky Monahan Brown feel honoured to be doing the honours for ALLYSON STACK, DANIEL SHAND, ELISE HADGRAFT, and KATHARINE MACFARLANE.
But we need you, too – after You Can’t Go Back Again, there will be only one more, extra-special, super-secret show in INTERROBANG?!’s preview season. And your participation and feedback will help us find out more about what, exactly, INTERROBANG?! is.
He’ll be there, too!
Connect with us here, on Twitter @InterrobangEdin, on Instagram, and on Facebook. And if you’re one of those millennial types who doesn’t carry cash, you can get your tickets for INTERROBANG: You Can’t Go Back Again?! on Eventbrite.
It’s gonna be like Elvis’s ’68 comeback special – you’ll want to say you were there!
OK. When Beth and Ricky come on, I need you to scream!
Kaite Welsh submits to the Interrobang Interrogation
Kaite Welsh is an author, critic and journalist. You may have heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Her novel The Wages of Sin, a feminist historical crime novel set in Victorian Edinburgh, is out from Headline in June 2017. She also throws a cracking Eurovision party.
And here’s how she answered our questions:
?!: The theme of the first Interrobang is The First Time. When did you first realise you wanted to write?
KW: I remember being around 8 and deciding I was going to be a poet. I stayed up all night once and wrote 26 poems, all of which were dreadful, and several pictures of horses to accompany them although most of the poems weren’t even about horses. People think I’m productive now, but when I was 8 I was on fire. In the end, my poetic abilities didn’t stay with me to adulthood – I was in my first year of uni when I realised that if I wanted to be a writer I had to, you know, write something and spent a few years writing short stories and experimenting with literary fiction (although it turned out that was just a phase).
?!: And what’s the first book you remember reading?
KW: The first book I remember being read to me was The Hobbit, when I was around 2 or 3. My mother read it to us as a bedtime story, complete with voices – I’m pretty sure that’s where Andy Serkis took his Gollum voice from. Then, when I was learning to read at primary school, I remember her taking this hardback Everyman edition of Jane Eyre down from the bookshelf, reading the first few pages aloud and saying to me “This is why you’re learning to read.”
?!: What song would you like as your entry music? Or should we just choose something?
KW: My wife and I eloped and I never got a chance to walk down the aisle to The Wedding March, so that or the James Bond theme. It’s my jam.
?!: What are your most and least favourite words?
KW: Most: “We’ll pay you.” Least “There’ll be terrific exposure!”
?!: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
KW: My first book, The Wages of Sin, is out next year. It’s a historical feminist crime novel about a fallen woman turned medical student turned detective in 1890s Edinburgh. It’s available for pre-order if you want to get your hands on it the moment it’s published, although like they say in the Bodyform advert, you don’t have to – you just can.
Thanks a lot to Kaite for indulging Interrobang’s Interrogation. Come along to Interrobang – The First Time on 7 October and find out why you learned to listen!
The next of our featured guests for Interrobang – The First Time, Stuart A. Paterson, has also taken a few minutes to complete The Interrobang Interrogation. Nice one!
Stuart A. Paterson submits to the Interrobang Interrogation
Multi-award-winning poet Stuart A. Paterson’s honours include an Eric Gregory Award from the UK Society of Authors and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust. Described by Alan Bold in The Sunday Times as “McGough by way of Morgan,” his latest collection, Aye, is available on Tapsalteerie.
And here’s how he answered our questions:
?!: The theme of Interrobang #1 is The First Time. When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?
SAP: I’ve never wanted to be a writer. I’ve written poetry since I was about 12 or 13 & still love doing so, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a poet or writer. I don’t like the stereotyping or pigeonholing such descriptions bring, & besides, I don’t live in a garret. Although I am broke.
?!: And what’s the first book you remember reading?
SAP: Rupert The Bear & the Cloud Pirates. Or maybe The Bible. They’re both pretty intertwined in my memory, which, given the subject matter, is unsurprising really.
?!: What song would you like as your entry music? Or should we just choose something?
SAP: Jarama Valley/Bandiera Rosa by The Laggan, from 3.20 in as BandieraRosa begins.
?!: What are your favourite and least favourite words?
SAP: Favourite – ‘aye’. Least favourite – ‘naw’
?!: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
SAP: Allergic to mushrooms. Feeds badgers. Was born in a convent & raised by nuns.
Thanks a lot to Stuart for indulging Interrobang’s Interrogation. Come along to Interrobang – The First Time on 7 October and have a right good jig as Stuart takes the stage!
The first of our featured guests for Interrobang – The First Time, Ross McCleary, has taken a few minutes to complete The Interrobang Interrogation. Bangin!
Ross’s Interrogation begins
Ross is from Edinburgh. His work has appeared far and wide, near and a little too close. He has a pamphlet published by Spacecraft Press, and a novella/book/text published by Maudlin House based out of Illinois. How cool is that? He is a writer for poets against humanity, an organiser for Inky Fingers, and an editor of podcast journal Lies, Dreaming.
And here’s how he answered our questions:
?!: The theme of the first Interrobang is The First Time. When did you first realise you wanted to write?
RMcC: I don’t think I ever didn’t want to write. I remember writing when I was very young, then again in my teens, and beyond. There are huge weird gaps where I didn’t but those are hard to remember insofar as I can’t explain why I didn’t write in those periods. Some time after university I began to write on a semi-regular basis. Then some time after that, at some point caught between writing and not writing, I chose writing and after that I’ve tended to write every day. So while I haven’t ever not wanted to write, there have been periods in which I’ve had to rediscover the need to write that I have always had.
?!: And what’s the first book you remember reading?
RMcC: The Worst Witch? Or maybe a Roald Dahl one? I reckon it’s likely that my first book was one of those Magic Key books – there was one where they get shrunk down and go inside a dolls house. That’s probably one of the first.
?!: What song would you like as your entry music? Or should we just choose something?
RMcC: Hmmm. I’ll get back to you on this, but I’d be intrigued to know what you thought would suit!
?!: In honour of the Artist of your book on Maudlin Press, and in light of your alleged Billy Crystalness, how about This Charming Man? Or What (S)he Said [see next question]? …Yep, we’re feeling the second one…?!
RMcC: Haha, yes!!!
?!: What are your most and least favourite words?
RMcC: Most – Expression. My favourite words come and go.
Least – The refrain in my book is “he says” and because I have performed it a lot I now hate the word “says” .
?!: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
RMcC: I’m probably going to be reading something about working in an office and I wrote this instead of working so if I am unemployed by the time the night comes around you’ll know why.
Thanks a lot to Ross for indulging Interrobang’s Interrogation. Come along to Interrobang – The First Time on 7 October and find out whether Ross is still employed!
