Faxfiction

Gary Fisher performing his piece - How To GIve Your Stereo A Full Checkout. Picture Phil Olsen

FAXFICTION took place on Saturday 27 July 2019 at Waterside Arts Centre in Sale

Six writers – Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Rosie Garland, Valerie O’Riordan, Fat Roland and Nicholas Royle – have created six brand-new short stories focusing on old technologies - inlcuding cassette tapes, floppy discs, videos, 35mm slides, overhead projectors, Ansaphones, games consoles, View-Masters, faxes, Dictaphones, reel to reel, Ceefax and performed their pieces using gathered artefacts as part of this show. As an intro, sound artist Gary Fisher presented a live performance of a brand new commission especially for the event.

In Sarah-Clare Conlon’s Falling More Slowly, a novice sea voyager records the shipping forecast onto her Dictaphone to help her navigate the high seas, and in The Haunted Table by David Gaffney we see how a handwritten for-sale card on a supermarket noticeboard can lead to a rural nightmare. Legacy, by Valerie O’Riordan, focuses an old Ansamachine that holds disturbing family memories, and a few seconds of hidden video tape reveal an intriguing glimpse into the past in Nicholas Royle’s Artefact. In We Dream The Same Dream, Rosie Garland is stalked by an ex-lover who repeatedly mishears the lyrics on an old cassette they once enjoyed together. And finally, in Fat Roland’s story Massive Extreme PlayStation Disaster (Office Edition), we meet an imposter computer-game designer who becomes trapped in the layers of his own electronic world – can the audience help him escape?

See these stories performed live – with the ancient machines that inspired them – along with a live installation by sound artist Gary Fisher called How To Give Your Stereo a Full Checkout

Here's some pics of the event - courtesy of Phil Olsen

Sarah-Clare Conlon is Literature Editor of Creative Tourist and Writer-in-Residence at Manchester’s Victoria Baths. Her creative writing has been published by Centre for New Writing, Comma, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Flash, Reflex Fiction, Salt, Spelk, Stand and The Other Room, and in new Arachne anthology Story Cities.

David Gaffney is the author of four collections of short fiction, Sawn-off Tales, Aromabingo, The Half-life of Songs and More Sawn-Off Tales, two novels, Never Never and All The Places I’ve Ever Lived, and graphic novel The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head. A third novel and second graphic novel are on their way.

Tagged ‘literary hero’ by The Skinny, Rosie Garland is a poet, novelist, singer with post-punk band The March Violets and Writer-in-Residence at the John Rylands Library. Her writing has appeared in Mslexia, Butcher’s Dog, Ellipsis, Rialto and elsewhere, and she was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart and Forward Prizes.

Valerie O’Riordan is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bolton. Her short fiction has been published in Tin House, LitMag and The Lonely Crowd, among other journals. She is currently working on a novel, funded by Arts Council England.

Fat Roland is a story-mangling comic and champion of Literary Death Match Manchester, and he co-runs Bad Language, voted the UK’s best spoken word night two years in a row. His third solo show, Seven Inch, was commissioned by The Lowry and will be adapted for the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe.

Nicholas Royle is the author of three short story collections and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than 20 anthologies, is series editor of Best British Short Stories and runs Nightjar Press. Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School, he is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize.

Gary Fisher is a sound artist and experimental composer whose work explores sound through processes of inquiry and experimentation with objects, actions, words, places and technologies. He records, composes, performs and creates installations with various sound materials and approaches including found objects, found sounds from collected tapes and records, and invented instruments.