Tonight Dinesh's Scent: The Collected Works was launched at Bluecoat in Liverpool with readings from the book, which is published by Comma Books, and is a beautiful big hardback; the event was HOSTED BY SARAH MACLENNAN and the readers were
1. former Edge Hill student Claire Dean Easy on the Rose’s (story)
2. Ra Page The hate inside the inkwell (blog)
3. Andy Darby Bashful Alley Poems
4. Catherine Frances What do you want to know (blog)
6. Bryan Biggs Interesting times (blog)
7. Adrian Challis In Dreams (Story/performance piece)
8. Eleanor Rees A memory of sap (story)
9. Robert Sheppard The Power of Invisibility (blog post)
10. Edge Hill PhD student and Comma Press employee Jim Hinks Scent (story)
11. Dave Ward ('Items 1 to 17', story)
12. Duleep Allirajah The Sun… One Saturday (story)
13. Levi Tafari Zong (poem)
14. Film of Dinesh performing, from Bluecoat
It was a well-supported event, less emotional than the one exactly a year ago, one more focussed upon Dinesh as a writer (in a variety of modes).
This was the intro I'd written, but in the event, I said something else, which was about blogs, that this was one of the first books I'd read that collected BLOG POSTS as well as other kinds of writing. If I'd not thought that I would have said:
Dinesh was a poet. So am I – but I’m not going to read one of his poems. Dinesh wrote short stories. I have now and then - but I’m not going to read one of his. He was a teacher of creative writing, and so am I; he was a blogger and so am I – so I thought it fitting to remember him through this blog (which is still online and I link to it from mine). This is a post coming out of the teaching he did, out of his practice of writing short stories, and it even mentions poetry once or twice (how could it not?).
I then read The Power
of Invisibility, posted: April 9, 2011. It may be read in the book, but is of course still on the blog here! The best sentence must be: 'In the short story, we can witness the craft of the
writer in its most natural state. We see the rises and falls in the text and
know that this is keeping time with the writer’s own breathing.' (It's two sentences I realize now, and the rest is pretty good.)
First review by Sara Maitland here: http://bookoxygen.com/?p=6868
Previous posts about Dinesh are
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/im-dinesh-allirajah.html
His blog (linked to the right here) may also be accessed here.
‘Dinesh’s short
stories, poems and blogs present a cultural, social and political portrait of
life’s many experiences, revealing a panoramic view of society with humour and
a poetic rhythm that commands our attention.’ - Levi Tafari
