There can’t be too many more daunting things to do for a more-or-less beginner writer than reading your work out loud. Oh wait, there’s reading it out loud as part of a group that doesn’t know you yet, to other groups of writers and performers, at an Oscars night for a local arts and theatre group. On stage. With a swan-neck microphone that had gone dipping for weed during an earlier dramatic reading. No sweat then!

The evening was the occasion of the Sunny Worthing Arts Group ‘Oscar’s Oscars’ honouring winners of  their poetry and short story competitions and including, by invitation, readers representing local writers’ groups.  Ours, (I say ours – I’d been to my first meeting just last week), West Sussex Writers’ Group was fielding a winsome trio. Tracy Fells with a piece about ‘lady naughtiness’ she hoped wouldn’t get us banned, Lyn Jennings who explodes her poetry out into the audience from a deceptively unassuming frame, and me. I think I must have missed the  trick where, at the call for volunteers, you take one step backwards and leave some poor blighter in the spotlight. So WSWG took a chance, I took a very deep breath, and nobody died, even theatrically. You’ve seen my two pieces here before but, in honour of their survival in the face of extreme duress and extraordinary rendition (it was indeed, quite extraordinary as sticking to a script is not my strong point), I’m going to give them their own posts. Look out for ‘Kitchen Forensics’, revised for immediacy, and ‘Philosopher Stoned’ for which I had to find out how to pronounce ‘hegemonies’. My head is not concerned with such matters, but my mouth needed to know. In the end we were no wiser as it seems there are two, which might both be American. You, Dear Reader, are on your own!

Thank you WSW, thank you SWAG, for one of the most delightfully wacky evenings I have passed in a long while!

‘Riding the Carousel’ by Tracy Fells was included in FlashFlood on National Flash Fiction Day.