Tag: events

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Closing Times

On Saturday, I was sitting in Blend on Dock Street and thinking about what to write for this entry. During my visit, I found out the café itself was about to cease trading at some point next month.

The following day, Blend released a more detailed statement on Instagram, confirming the end date as Sunday 10 August. From the pespective of its customers, it’s not just the closure of a handy city centre café, it’s the loss of an ideal place to run events. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three pals who use the place for shows or gatherings, including the Hotchpotch open-mic I used to organise.

However, there are two factors in its favour:

Firstly, this is not the first time Blend has closed. In 2023, after a few years on another street, it was offered its current location and was quickly able to re-open. I’m not privy to the details of that arrangement, but who knows what the next 19 days might hold.

Secondly, there’s a second branch in the middle of Baxter Park, a largely residential area, that will remain open. This is handy if you were visiting the park anyway, but it requires a bus trip or an uphill walk from Dock Street.

From a personal perspective, I’ve already booked to be in Lancaster on the day of closure. As such, I won’t be there to see the shutter pulled down for the last time, but I will keep an ear out for this emerging story.

Separately from this, the publisher 404 Ink announced its upcoming closure earlier this month.

This is different from Blend because it won’t be an abrupt end. Rather, it’s a gradual process until summer 2026. Any upcoming launches will still be going ahead, and there will be discussions with authors about retention of rights.

As such, there isn’t much else to report on this situation at the moment, but it sounds like it’s all in hand and I’m sure we’ll hear more over the next 12 months.

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Looking Back at Past Readings

At the beginning of May, I spoke about having my computer kitted out with 12GB of RAM, giving its processing power a significant boost from the previous 4GB. This meant Windows no longer had to leech space off the hard disc for basic tasks.

Even without that leeching, the disc was still almost at its limit – and that wasn’t including my videos, which had to stay on OneDrive only. A few weeks ago, I decided to have a look at these videos again and see whether any could be discarded.

After watching a few, I decided not to delete them. I instead followed the recommendations from several forum posts to convert them from the current data-intensive format into a more space-efficient one.

Many of the videos are poetry and story readings from live events spanning 2014 to 2022, with a heavy skew towards 2015 and 2016. They were intended primarily as references so I could improve my performances rather than finished products, so some of the camera work is shoddy, but the audio is crisp. I’ve fallen out of the habit of filming as I’ve gathered more experience.

Instead, the videos have become a memento of a new era. In the earlier ones, I’d just taken over my open-mic night Hotchpotch. We were in a different venue and the format was more like a story circle than a staged event.

Then there were other readings I’d forgotten, held in places such as Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Scottish Poetry Library. I recognised early drafts of works that have either become substantially different final products or have languished unseen since their composition.

While there are a handful of videos made after 2020, just two of these are readings. These were specific projects and were intended for a wider audience, so more care was taken over these.

Now the collection is under control, I’ll be more selective about what’s added. Any run-of-the-mill readings probably won’t make the cut, even if they might be interesting in years to come. Maybe I’ll make an exception if I’m ever on telly.

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Staying Away From My Usual Groups

Long-term readers will know that after nine years, I decided to stop hosting my open mic night Hotchpotch.

I’m far from the first host, but the previous handovers were typically haphazard. That didn’t matter so much when our events were smaller and more intimate affairs. As we now boast our largest-ever following, we needed a few months to make the handover go smoothly. That period has now elapsed, so I stayed away from last Wednesday’s event to emphasise this clean break.

That evening, I instead took the opportunity to attend an indoor labyrinth walk that clashes with Hotchpotch. It’s entirely a coincidence, as our schedules are independent of each other.

You don’t need to be religious or spiritual to go along. The organiser brings a massive canvas with the labyrinth pattern, setting up candles and relaxing music to generate the atmosphere. While I was still geographically close enough to help out with the open mic if it was absolutely necessary, the walk offered a distraction. By all accounts, however, the event went well.

I also missed my weekly Tuesday writing group, called What’s Your Story, but for different reasons.

My poetry circle, the Wyverns, produces a pamphlet every year in conjunction with the University of Dundee. The launch event was supposed to be on a different day, but there was an unexpected double booking that was – fortunately – spotted weeks in advance.

Our theme this year was the George Orwell novel 1984, marking the 75th year since its publication. Because the author died barely a year later, this has also led to the book entering the public domain, at least in the UK and the EU, which gave us considerable artistic freedom. My contribution was titled 1985 and imagined how the totalitarian regime might end, based on the real-life Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia, starting in 2010.

I’ll definitely be back at What’s Your Story tonight. I’ll probably also be back at Hotchpotch next month, but strictly as a punter rather than a host.

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A Plea to Organisers – Create an Event Listing

If you’re the organiser of a literary, comedy or any similar event, I urge you to read this entry about the importance of creating clear event listings. Or should you really be unable to spare the time, at least skip to the bottom line.

Regular readers will know I host and co-organise an open-mic for writers called Hotchpotch, typically on the second Wednesday of each month. We then have a self-imposed deadline of four days to compose a bulletin about the next event.

While a substantial chunk of the text remains static from month to month, we always go around the members at the end of each session asking for other local events to be featured in that bulletin. We take a recording for our reference and make sure we ask for the time, date and venue.

The problem arises when it’s time to compose the bulletin. At the last session, a member said he’d be performing the following week at an open-mic for musicians. As it was a venue well-known by locals, I thought it would be easy to find.

I discovered this particular place uses Facebook for its events, as do many others. This is not a problem in itself, but it was difficult to find a reference to the open-mic, as all the events were years out of date. I eventually found one reference in a picture that had been pushed down the feed by other updates.

This is only the latest instance of being unable to find events. Some have websites that haven’t been updated for some time, if ever. Others omit vital information like the start time, or require the visitor to email an organiser for details.

By now, you might be thinking there’s a simple solution: ask people to send us events in writing, complete with URL.

But this isn’t the easy option it sounds. I’ve been running this event a long time, and collecting events while you have members’ attention is much easier. Waiting for people to send in submissions can cause a significant delay, and some forget entirely once they’re back home.

With Hotchpotch, we post our bulletins in three main places:

  1. On an opt-in email announcements list.
  2. As a Facebook event.
  3. At a static URL that always shows the latest update.

Additionally, we post the static URL to our social media pages every couple of weeks, so visitors shouldn’t have to scroll back more than three or four updates to find it.

Despite the bottleneck caused by finding external events, our reason is a simple one: if we don’t do it for other organisers, they’ll have no reason to do it for us. There are some organisations, such as Creative Dundee and I Am Loud who regularly boost our events, and reach people we can’t.

The bottom line is: Whatever format you choose to publish your listings, please keep them in an obvious place and update them regularly. Take an afternoon to sort out your online presence: it helps new – and existing – punters to find your events, it helps promoters to boost them, and it helps our community as a whole.

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Making an Event Flexible Without Losing the Audience

On Saturday just gone, my open-mic event Hotchpotch collaborated with I Am Loud Productions from Edinburgh.

After an open-mike segment, the three headline acts would give us their best work. With close co-operation from the venue, it was a marvellous night, and showcased the best of both organisations.

However, I did admit to I Am Loud that I was initially in two minds about whether to allow them to take over our event.

To understand my thinking, let me take you back to February this year. I received a message from a reasonably high-profile poet from the other coast of Scotland. She was putting together a book tour and wanted to include our event as place to promote it.

I was flattered she’d heard about us and thought about us, as I’d been to see her show in 2019. I realised immediately, however, this tour would not be a good fit for us. Our open-mic shows are about audience participation, with no one person featured more highly than another.

We exchanged a few e-mails and I proposed a solution of starting the book launch at 6pm, then beginning the open-mic at 7pm as usual. I would also have been prepared to host a special event separately from the open-mic. Our talks ultimately came to a halt, but I did recommend she approach another group I know, and I hear she’s going to be a headliner there soon.

So when I Am Loud wanted to collaborate, I was convinced to give the green light when I heard the open-mic element would be part of the show. This would be in a much-reduced form, with just eight slots of three minutes apiece, compared to unlimited slots of seven minutes.

In practice, though, there was a smaller audience than usual, perhaps because the regular crowd are accustomed to Wednesday events rather than those on Saturday. As such, only five of the eight slots were taken, so nobody was left disappointed.