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Manchester Zine Fair and Hey Hey Hey book launch

In Manchester Art Gallery at Thursday tea-time, from 5pm until 8.45pm, one of three things will happen.

1. A sweltering portal to hell will rip open in the floor, releasing a hoard of bleeding and enraged LS Lowry matchstalk men who will suck the creativity from your brain using sink plungers, drills and silly putty.

2. The Manchester Zine Fair will host a whole range of brilliant publications, with stalls dotted around the ground floor of the gallery. One of those will be the official launch bookstall of Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey And Other Short Fiction, so you have to come and buy one. I'll even sign it. Later in the evening, Dave Haslam will introduce a talk about new publication based on the gallery's current theme Dreams Without Frontiers in which you should listen intently, wine in hand, but all along, let your veins inside your human body pulse to the rhythm of "hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey."

3. An old man will fall asleep in a chair. He won't remember his dream, but two hours after he wakes, he will develop an acute taste for tinned ham.

Live page updated

The live page has been updated. Go here to look at it.

It has four upcoming events. On the 28th, I do a 20-minute set at OpenMind, a delightfully eccentric cabaret night of poets, musicians and people saying rude things. On the 30th, I hang out with the poets at the Lead Poets & Prose Society in Chorlton. On the 31st, I'll be launching my new collection on a bookstall at the Manchester Art Gallery zine fair - more about that soon.

And then in mid-February, I'll do a support slot for David Hartley's book launch for Gumbo Press. All the links are on the live page.

Anx-book-iety

My new book is at the printers. Hey.

I am cacking my longjohns. Hey hey.

It has been designed and edited to insane levels. The 25 stories that made the final cut for the anthology had to go through a Tron-style battle where the futuristic bikes were made from terror and self-doubt. Hey hey hey.

And now all I do is hope that when the books come back from the printers, they are not made from broken windows and half-chewed eyeballs. Hey hey hey hey.

Someone is interviewing me on Tuesday. Hey hey hey hey hey.

I have been tagged in a meme, which I shall use to promote the new book. Hey hey hey hey hey hey.

I will launch the book in an art gallery event. Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey.

My longjohns are cacked. Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey.

New book on 31 Jan: Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey Hey And Other Short Fiction

Available from the Fat Roland shop. To be launched at 5pm on January 31 at the Manchester Art Gallery zine fair.

#heyheyfiction

Victorian Girl

"it must have been hard to win the presedensy what with all the reasoned dibate you had to do on television"

New story Victorian Girl, as performed at Sadcore Dadwave in November 2012, now up on the video page of this site.

Face man; happy, happy face man

Food

I wish

I died once during the war

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Slow journey

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Quiz subsection 88

In

This is where you

Click to enlarge.

Feed me toilet duck

Brillenda picks up

Click to enlarge.

My pockets are for tissues #3

Dear Frances,

Aside finding in my pockets the butchered corpse of Philip Schofield, a bloodied axe, a badly-penned sketch of the butchered corpse of Philip Schofield, and a chainsaw bearing your name smeared in blood, Coleen Nolan's been sick in the pool.

Words cannot express how furious I am with you, Frances. Shop receipts, packets of sweets: no room for anything.

You left me no choice and that’s why I did what I did.

I skinned your dog. I filled your dog’s skin with bits of Philip and now Dog Skin Phil carries my keys and my housing forms and my tissues and my coins. I don’t need pockets now because of Dog Skin Phil.

You should see him swim.

Sometimes I look at my family and wonder what life would be like if they were all dead. I have nowhere to put that thought, Frances. Nowhere at all.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

My pockets are for tissues #2

Dear Frances,

And my hands. My pockets are somewhere to put my hands. I put my hands in my pockets because, Frances, sometimes I like to put my hands in my pockets.

Thanks for your help with the Tuesday class this morning, but it wasn’t necessary. Attendance was poor and one of the children was sick in the pool.

When I went to get a long-handled net, you put a severed finger in my pocket. If this is Philip Schofield’s finger, I’m going to be furious. Numbers are down, Frances, and the numbers we do have spill their stomachs or stick photographs of Coleen Nolan in the lockers.

There are many things I keep in my pockets that I haven’t mentioned yet: coins, travel cards, hastily-scrawled unattributed telephone numbers.

Coleen Nolan in the lockers, Frances.

I don’t want to have to write to you again.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

My pockets are for tissues #1

Dear Frances,

I am writing this letter of complaint because you keep leaving things in my pockets.

At first it was a joke like the time I lost my swimming costume and you hung it from the diving board, or the time I was doing practice swims and you replaced the chlorine with iodine, or the time you made your dog a costume using the skin of my cat.

But now you are putting things in my pockets. I need my pockets for important things like keys and housing forms and tissues and I know tissues are not important but this whole thing raises crucial hygiene issues.

This morning I found in my pockets a bad biro drawing of Philip Schofield with the old black hair he doesn’t have any more.

Please consider this as a cease and desist.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

Nirvana