Caroline Reid Writes

For your ears only I'm soooo excited about this! Short stories penned by Australian writers, read in a pub by Adelaide actors. We did a couple of these readings last year, to test the water, see if there was a demand for the old oral story telling. Turns out, there is! People love being read to. It seems to happen less and less as we get older so this is a real treat. And extra special, I think, when trained actors do the reading. These men and women know how to read well. As I got interested in writing short stories, naturally I began to read more, and in doing so I discovered a wealth of talent in short fiction writers in Australia. Who knew? Now I love reading stories by Jennifer Mills, Nam Le, Paddy O'Reilly, AS Patric, Tricia Dearborn, Julie Chevalier, Josephine Rowe, Susan McCreery, Tom Cho, Ryan O'Neill, Kim Westwood, Irma Gold ... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Just a week to go until our first night of readings in 2012. It's at The Whe...

Pete Sutcliffe aka The Yorkshire Ripper Begun today: a story set in Manchester, 1977, the year that the body of Jean Jordan was discovered in an allotment next to Southern Cemetery, Moss Side, Manchester. She was the first of Sutcliffe's victims to be discovered in this city. The others were killed in Bradford and Leeds.  My family returned to the UK from Australia in 1977 and spent that year living in Manchester. There was fear on the streets fuelled, no doubt, by the media and the chatter of adults. As children, we were on the lookout for potential Rippers and had our list of local suspects. And so, on the cobbled streets of Salford, near Strangeways Prison, the story begins... I may be out of contact for some time ...

Prayer Dawn Yates in Prayer to an Iron God, deckchair theatre, 2003 This was used as the poster image for the 2003 production of Prayer to an Iron God at deckchair theatre (Victoria Hall) in Fremantle, Western Australia; directed by Glenn Hayden; produced by Glenn Hayden and deckchair theatre. I love the colours and how they bleed into one another, as the characters in the play also bleed into their environment, metaphorically and literally. Dawn played the character of TB ('Tits and Balls' - you never find out her real name), the real survivor in the play. Based on some of the tough women I had around me growing up in Kalgoorlie ( outback Australia), TB doesn't pull any punches. But I like to think of her as a toasted marshmallow - tough and burnt on the outside, gooey and sweet on the inside. Caroline x