"Better Read than Dead"
Biggar Writers and Writers' Bloc
Biggar Corn Exchange 27th May 2008
Anne Armstrong
A poetry reading in a stourie auld howf? No way! Writers’ Bloc and Biggar Writers presented an evening of high octane, in-your-face poetry and prose which shattered the popular stereotype of reading events and provided a disappointingly small audience with a night of uproarious entertainment.
Gavin Inglis
Writers’ Bloc, a performance collective based in Edinburgh, are leading lights in Scotland’s strong spoken word performance scene. Alan Campbell, Morag Edward, Andrew Ferguson and comrades delivered with confidence and panache a breenge of fabulous twist-laden tales. Gavin Inglis’s story in particular, Pisces Ya Bas!, about a psychopathic ned-fish in a Glasgow municipal pond, was both energetic and outrageously funny.
Fiona Gibson
Biggar Writers were represented by Anne Armstrong who read from her The I Hate Poetry Wee Book of Poetic Gems, Margaret Dunlop who gave a moving account of the Scottish Hunger March, led from Glasgow to Edinburgh in 1933 by the Red Clydesider Harry McShane, from her book Marching in Scotland, Dancing in New York, Fiona Gibson who recounted a cringingly ill-starred amorous encounter from her hilarious new novel Mummy Said the F Word, and Andrew McCallum who took us on a journey in synthetic Scots Fae Dixie ti Darfur via the vulpine carnality of a chance encounter in the rain outside a nightclub in Dundee.
Andrew Ferguson
Such was the great time being had by performers and audience alike that the evening ran more than an hour over time, and credit is due to Fiona, Iain, Jennifer and Linda of Biggar Theatre Workshop for their patience, wonderful hospitality and all the work they put in behind the scenes to help stage the event.
Hopefully, it won’t be too long before Writers’ Bloc are back in Biggar again.
