Manifesting Ourselves

As a side project on my Napier MA Course, and what a pleasant course it is, if you want that £3750 removed from your bank account, six part-time students wrote manifestos to be produced in print and ‘manifested’ at a local venue. The experience has been an interesting lesson in patience, collaboration and writing-in-the-real-world-to-deadlines-and-such.

My manifesto evolved from four children sitting in the café discussing various ways to torture monkeys and cats. The end result was a sect known as the Hattists, the gag being the ritual donning of hatwear at all times. Har-har. At the time we chortled at our strange humour, and the presentation went down well, but after a weeks, I got fed up of the thing.

My task, then, was to sustain enthusiasm for a project that basically took one night to write. The manifesto had been ready since I wrote a mock-up for a class presentation. So I would have to hold onto my fondness for this thing for the eight months it took to bleed it into print.

At first I was irked that it was our responsibility to design the manifestoes. There seemed to be an assumption that we were knowledgeable about how to format A5 documents, that we were also visual artists, and that we knew how publishing layouts worked. So, in a muddle of confusion, the project hid in the cellar for months until we were forced into action.

At this point, the few undergraduates who volunteered to help us dropped out, leaving us on our own. Now. I am not a natural leader. I don’t want to lead anything. Except leading my stories into print. Or leading cake into my mouth. Leaders are people willing to be called tosscocks, and have loins of steel. I take a slightly large phone bill as a personal insult. Not a good leader.

I am also, frankly, unhelpful in a group scenario. Generally, in groups, there are only a short number of logical suggestions to be posited, and they get posited by someone eventually. I limit my contributions to nodding and basking in the charm of others. So this group collaboration was a new experience for me, and I like to think I handled it with a certain flexibility. Though no sexual acts were required, apart from some mild fisting.

We were being tested on our autonomy as a group, and coping with the deadlines and demands. I also had to take on a second manifesto when one member of the group pulled out, so had to edit someone else’s work for publication. This was another daunting challenge, and I’m not sure I pulled off a first-rate editing job, but hopefully the manifesto speaks for itself. That is, after all, the purpose of a manifesto. That’s my excuse, anyway.

The biggest challenge for me is on Saturday, when we ‘manifest’ our manifestoes in little 10-min presentations, organised by Forge of the Wordsmiths. In front of people. I still can’t believe that I volunteered to speak. But I could use the experience at reading as – like it or not, and I don’t like it, not one little bit – public reading is part of the writer’s life. I will have my Hattist comrades for support, so fingers crossed it goes down well.

A big round of applause, then, for all the manifesters and their sterling work in putting the manifestos together. It has been a painfully jolly time for all.