It was party time at the Gala Studio when the Literature Festival teamed up with proudWORDS for an evening of the best of women's writing. Iconoclastic writers Fiona Cooper and Kitty Fitzgerald romped through a selection of readings from their own work and that of women who had been an inspiration to them both. There was bucks fizz, there were sequins, there was prose, poetry and music, there were jelly babies and prizes - and pay attention, because there was also a quiz!
The two writers began by introducing each other: they were long-standing friends with much in common, including a Catholic upbringing which had marked them both for life, though not necessarily in the way it had been intended to! Both had dressed up for the occasion, from Kitty's technicolour shoes to Fiona's pirate jacket, for they had something to celebrate: the success of Kitty's forthcoming novel Pigtopia. And they share an enthusiasm for the writer Marge Piercy: each had chosen to start by reading one of her poems. Marge Piercy's was one of the voices which recurred throughout the evening; another was Dorothy Parker:
Interview
The ladies men admire, I've heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognise an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints.
So far, I have had no complaints.
Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope
Readings followed from Kitty Fitzgerald's Snapdragons, from Fiona Cooper's The Empress of the Seven Oceans and from the poems of Liz Lochhead: Kitty Fitzgerald chose the poem Everybody's Mother "because all my female friends have problems with their mothers". "The characters in my books generally don't have mothers," replied Fiona Cooper, "because it's easier," but she managed to find one example, in her Western Heartbreak on the High Sierra (or, as a colour-blind friend had called it, reading from its red and green jacket, On The.)
Lily Savage has described Fiona Cooper as "a lesbian trapped in a drag queen's body", and the close of the evening's first half gave the audience a chance to judge the truth of this:
the two divas treated us to a recreation of an evening in the Mother Black Cap in London's Camden Town, during the heady days of the campaign against Section 28. Waving their magic wands like a pair of fairy godmothers, they first turned everyone present gay, and then turned themselves into a pair of drag queens, complete with blonde ringlets, rubber gloves, handcuffs and lipstick. Then they vanished to the bar, in a puff of magic and a shower of jelly babies, scattered by the magnificently sequined Maureen (winner of the prize for Best Costume).
More readings followed: Fiona Cooper revealed an unexpected passion for Victorian best-seller Marie Corelli, reading a description of Zara, the heroine of A Romance of Two Worlds:
I stepped into a spacious and lofty apartment where the light seemed to soften and merge into many shades of opaline radiance and delicacy - a room the beauty of which would at any other time have astonished and delighted me, but which now appeared as nothing beside the surpassing loveliness of the woman who occupied it. Never shall I behold again any face or form so divinely beautiful! She was about the medium height of women, but her small finely-shaped head was set upon so slender and proud a throat that she appeared taller than she actually was. Her figure was most exquisitely rounded and proportioned, and she came across the room to give me greeting with a sort of gliding graceful movement, like that of a stately swan floating on calm sunlit water. Her complexion was transparently clear - most purely white, most delicately rosy. Her eyes - large, luminous and dark as night, fringed with long silky black lashes - looked like
"Fairy lakes, where tender thoughtsHer rich black hair was arranged à la Marguerite, and hung down in one long loose thick braid that nearly reached the end of her dress; and she was attired in a robe of deep old gold Indian silk as soft as cashmere, which was gathered in round her waist by an antique belt of curious jewel-work, in which rubies and turquoises seemed to be thickly studded. On her bosom shone a strange gem, the colour and form of which I could not determine. It was never the same for two minutes together. It glowed with many various hues - now bright crimson, now lightning-blue, sometimes deepening into a rich purple or tawny orange. Its lustre was intense, almost dazzling to the eye. Its beautiful wearer gave me welcome with a radiant smile and a few cordial words, and drawing me by the hand to the low couch she had just vacated, made me sit down beside her.
Swam softly to and fro,"
Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds
"If Marie Corelli describes a storm on the mountainside," said Fiona Cooper, "you feel it; if Marie Corelli describes someone falling in love, your heart beats with it. And that for me is what writing is."
There was still time for a few more poems from Kitty Fitzgerald, including two resulting from her mini-residency at Eddie's Tattoo Studio, and for Fiona Cooper to tease with just a taste of the introduction to her new erotic novel, As You Desire Me; the problem with writing erotica, she said, was that she couldn't read it without laughing - and she dropped some very tantalising hints about the possibility of orgasmic sex inside a pantomime horse costume.
After which it remained only to reveal the answers to the quiz, and to award the prizes. The best quiz score was three correct answers: can you do better?
Which Woman said...?
This website is maintained by Cornwell Internet
as part of their sponsorship of the Literature Festival
Last update: 13th October 2004