Station Stories at Manchester Piccadilly
Station Stories rolls into Manchester Piccadilly at midday on Thursday, with three slots a day over three days. The eagerly awaited site-specific literary project sees six North West-based writers performing brand new tales of trains and tracks in various locations around the transport hub, each with its own set-up and each with a specially commissioned soundscape by Landcrash, aka musician Daniel Hopkins.
“Station Stories will take people on a literary journey,” says flash fiction author and novelist David Gaffney, who came up with the idea. “It will explore the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy, and it will express the peculiar, unique qualities of the station – a marginal, in-between world.”
Members of the audience will be given headphones and taken around the concourse to particular points to listen to the live broadcasts and play spot the storyteller. Some of the writers will be easily identified: one, Nicholas Royle, sits at the end of Platform 5 with a notebook and a flask of soup while reading The Lancashire Fusilier; another, Jenn Ashworth, is in a photo booth. The others will be less obvious, and members of the public may even interact with them – especially if provoked, for example by blatant littering.
“The unpredictability of it is something I found really attractive,” says Ashworth. “Each performance – and each of the pieces – is going to be quite different, yet as a whole they work together to give a flavour of the lives and stories that might be whirling around Piccadilly at any moment.”
Gaffney – whose flash fiction collection The Half-life Of Songs was recently longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize – says all six stories “are unique to the station setting”.
As well as his contribution, Hidden Obvious Typical, there is Marble by horror author Tom Fletcher, Terminus by poet Tom Jenks, and three versions of The People Spotter (one for each of the three different performance times) by Bookmunch editor Peter Wild.
Of the six writers involved in the project, Ashworth – whose début A Kind Of Intimacy and newly published Cold Light are both critically-acclaimed – is the only woman, although she says the “difference between the stories is more to do with our versatility as writers and our own particular interests than our genders”. She does, however, concede: “My story, Soulless, is a playful reply to Anna Karenina - possibly the most famous woman ever to have done anything in a train station!”
Ashworth continues: “Station Stories is really exciting because it’s something very different to other projects I’ve been a part of – I decided to get involved because working with a sound team on a project that relies so much on the ambience of the space really tied into my interest in collaboration and writing that makes special use of setting.
“Working with the sound technician has made me view my performance and the train station itself in an entirely new way. I don’t think I’ll ever walk through the station again without thinking about the characters the six of us have invented – the voices we’re setting free there – and, after our performances, I don’t think the audience will either. They’re in for a treat!”
Station Stories performances are at noon, 3pm and 7pm on Thursday 19, Friday 20 and Saturday 21 May. Tickets cost £11 each. For more information and ticket bookings, visit the event’s official website.
Guest post by Sarah-Clare Conlon, freelance writer, editor and press officer. Her award-winning blog, Words & Fixtures, is about language, literature, arts and culture.
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