{"id":11029,"date":"2019-10-06T11:32:43","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T10:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11029"},"modified":"2019-10-06T11:32:43","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T10:32:43","slug":"mlf-2019-common-people-at-the-cosmo-rodewald-theatre-martin-harris-centre-51019-reviewed-by-charlotte-wetton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11029","title":{"rendered":"MLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5\/10\/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of Common People,\u00a0<\/em>Manchester Literature\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went to the \u2018Common People\u2019 event because I crave new stories and new voices. Working-class experience in literature is a rich seam not yet tapped. If I were a publisher, I would be signing up some of these debut writers pronto.<\/p>\n

Common People<\/em> is an anthology of memoir \u2013 short pieces of a few thousand words, edited by Kit de Waal. Celebrating the success of her first novel My Name is Leon,<\/em> de Waal was left with a sense of \u2018where is everyone?\u2019 and wanted to create an anthology that was \u2018celebratory and unapologetically working-class\u2019. Manchester Literature Festival had invited Lisa Blower, Stuart Maconie, Adam Sharp and Alex Wheatle to read from their pieces and discuss the book.<\/p>\n

And there was a celebratory warmth in the extracts read: Blower\u2019s love of factory-floor Stoke dialect gained from \u2018chattering matriarchs\u2019; and her Del Monte fruit salads with evaporated milk. \u00a0Or Maconie\u2019s council houses, whose identical room layouts were \u2018handy at darkened parties\u2019. Legendary local characters from these childhoods loom large: the kid who set fire to his pubic hair; the girl who died from chewing gum. Blower\u2019s Nan is almost in the auditorium, stealing the show from her granddaughter with reported lines like \u2018I was so beautiful, I could have been killed.\u2019 Maconie\u2019s enthusiastic reading, in particular, brings guffaws from the audience; not least his sarcastic trouncing of pop-song lyrics like \u2018Little Boxes\u2019 that belittle working-class lives. By contrast, Adam Sharp\u2019s memoir of childhood abandonment and parental drug-addiction ensures there\u2019s no saccharine gloss to the event. His recounting of his mother\u2019s repeated, failed attempts at home abortion renders the auditorium silent. (Although his dead-pan style \u2013 both writing and reading \u2013 gives some cracking one liners.)<\/p>\n

And this naming \u2013 whether affectionate or harrowing \u2013 is important. The naming of tinned fruit salad or \u2018the backs\u2019 in print<\/em> is reclamation and conservation. Just as it\u2019s important to name those experiences of micro-aggressions and outright discrimination: Blower\u2019s peers at her new school were told not to speak to her or her sister \u2018because they thought we were scousers\u2019; Maconie recollects his accent being mocked when he started at the BBC \u2018as if that were OK\u2019. He also offers a more subtle example of how the NME would always print the swearwords of the Happy Mondays phonetically, as a way of \u2018keeping you out, keeping you in your little box.\u2019 This act of naming and identifying is key. Committing these characters, street names, food-stuffs to print is tantamount to putting them in a glass museum case and saying: \u2018look, this thing is worth looking at\u2019.<\/p>\n

We have lost thousands of generations of working-class experience \u2013 through illiteracy and through cultural hierarchy. There is an urgency in curating or commissioning memoir, a no-frills form that asks for honesty. Maconie and Blower were approached by de Waal to contribute. Sharp and other unpublished authors gained a place through the public competition. Memoir conserves and shares.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an obvious parallel with the women\u2019s movement. It has taken at least fifty years of hard work for women writers to claim the validity of their experiences in literature. Fifty years of being mocked, ignored and patronised for writing about breast-feeding or sexual assault. Their arguments \u2013 that domestic space is as valid as political space, that social achievements are as great as military ones \u2013 have been made in the academy but also through the creative arts \u2013 through articulating experience and demanding empathy and legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s hope it doesn\u2019t take Common People<\/em> as long to gain validation. I\u2019m optimistic that in our more pluralistic age, readers will have the humility and respect to listen, read, and engage with another\u2019s experience \u2013 whether or not they share it.<\/p>\n

So now de Waal can celebrate others\u2019 successes as well as her own: this anthology is a communal shout of \u2018we are here!\u2019<\/p>\n

Charlotte Wetton\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>charlottewettonpoetry@gmail.com<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

5 October 2019<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of Common People,\u00a0Manchester Literature\u00a0 I went to the \u2018Common People\u2019 event because I crave new stories and new voices. Working-class experience in literature is a rich seam not yet tapped. If I were a publisher, I would be signing up some of these debut writers pronto. Common People is an anthology of memoir \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,16,283,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5\/10\/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11029\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"MLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5\/10\/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Review of Common People,\u00a0Manchester Literature\u00a0 I went to the \u2018Common People\u2019 event because I crave new stories and new voices. 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