Books by and for independent women

Five-Minute Friday: Cassandra Kill

Name: Cassandra Kill

Day job:  My main job is as a Project Manager for the community arts charity Art in the Park (Sheffield), where I work with freelance artists and writers, schools and community groups and a team of volunteers to organise projects of free participatory creative events for those who wouldn’t normally get involved in the arts.  My other job is doing Admin, Sales and Marketing for Pif Paf Theatre Company who use sculpture, performance, engineering, sound and natural history to create commissions, touring shows and participatory activities for new performance spaces.  I also do freelance art, drama and creative writing workshops for children, although I’ve been doing less of this sort of work recently.

Extra Curricular: I write a food column for Now Then magazine  and edit the recipes in the section. I also have a food blog, Not A Load of Tripe (although I can be rather slack at updating it). I’m generally interested in looking at food related ‘issues’ such as food and the environment or food and feminism.

I write poetry and short stories. Sometimes I perform poetry at open mic nights around Sheffield and last summer I did a couple of festival gigs performing my short story, Kill Lord Whitney. It’s a murder mystery based in a circus side show and has been published as a collaboration with Leeds based illustration duo, Lord Whitney, who provided the photos.

Every three months, I work with a team of local volunteers to put on the Sheffield Clothing Exchange which is basically a giant clothes swap. It’s a great community resource for people who can’t afford to spend a lot on clothes and avoids a lot of waste too. We’ve just started doing occasional textiles workshops using the leftover clothes.

So all in all rather busy…

Favourite book of all time: When I went on holiday to Thailand a few years ago, my Mum lent me Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood which I absolutely loved. I read The Year of the Flood more recently and thought it was such a clever counterpart to the original book.

Literary pet peeves: Ummmm…I’m not sure I have any per se, although I’ve never understood why people rave about On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve never managed to finish it as I always found it very repetitive and boring, not to mention hideously sexist.

Guilty pleasure: X men comics. I love reading them in the bath for the ultimate indulgence. My boyfriend bought me a collection of 53 of them from eBay for Christmas which is such a treat for me.

Three favourite authors: Margaret Atwood (see above); Hubert Selby Junior – I found a copy of Requiem for a Dream in a guesthouse in Northern India when I had a terrible stomach upset and my friends had had to leave town without me. It got me through the illness but I went through a very intense, gripping descent into madness alongside the characters. Genius. I also loved Last Exit to Brooklyn; Roald Dahl – I re-read a lot of his short stories when I was researching Kill Lord Whitney and they are just so well written. They always manage to pull of a perfect twist and his sense of the grotesque is superb.

Favourite fictional character: I know it might not be the most ‘literary’ answer (or feminist, come to think of it) but I think the character of Wolverine is utterly fascinating. Just the play off between chaos and order, wildness and civilisation and being a loner and part of a group makes him a really complex creature. And a lot of fun…

Other recommended reading: Another book my Mum gave me was The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, which was when I was at University so it felt like a sort of coming of age moment. I lent it to a friend, who lent it to her parents to “help them understand their divorce better”, which I thought was hilarious. Somehow I ended up getting it back and now intend to keep hold of it for any future daughter of mine.

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