Bebe Ashley's Brilliant Introduction to No Vacancy
We launched my latest microfiction collection No Vacancy in No Alibis last Tuesday evening and it was an absolute treat to have Belfast-based poet and all round, wonder woman, Bebe Ashley say a few introductory words about the collection. Bebe has kindly allowed me to share her speech below and I’d really encourage you to check out both her brilliant poetry collections Gold Light Shining and Harbour Doubts (both published by Banshee Press).
Hello! Welcome! It is always a surprise to bump into Jan at a book launch here in Belfast. Not because she doesn’t support the arts, because she obviously does, but because I almost always expect her to be somewhere else. Even today, I wondered if Jan would be here after crawling along the motorway on a slow-moving bus, cupcakes already eaten; not here because she is stuck in an airport, again; also not here because she’s fallen into a Trader Joe’s Mac and Cheese bag in Chicago and couldn't find her way out of it, or what I felt was the most likely outcome: here but delirious from nights of no sleep after staying at a combination of the most unhinged hotels known to humankind. Sometimes, it feels like if Jan is here, at another perfect book launch in No Alibis, then the pre-planned travel and accommodation of other people is safer.
Saying that, I don’t think there is any book launch in the world that could protect the hotel inhabitants of those in No Vacancy.
In No Vacancy, we move across time, and space, across geography and reality. In the hotel void, nothing can be trusted to be what it really is. A train is not a train but is a man standing underneath the hotel windows pretending he is a train, resplendent with grating screeching sounds at his fingertips. Elton John is in the next room along unless you actually knock on his door. The buffet is a disco with miniature Yorkshire puddings, a smoky smoking smoke machine and a mirrorball.
Sometimes, there are short snippets of comfort to be found. In Wellington, a room is “still dream dark and dozy”. In Poirotesque, in Brighton, we eagerly await a formulaic murder but nothing too messy. The comfort never lasts for long as the horrors of ordinary life pierces the periphery. In Lithuania, the best and unsettling advice available to the solo traveller is to ‘sleep in the recovery position’ as ‘if you are climbing stairs in your dreams’. In Strasbourg, an unwanted overnight guest, a Care Bear, is running himself a bubble bath.
No Vacancy is a book to dip in and out, and a book to fly through. Probably most importantly, it is a book to carry with you across the threshold of any hotel room. Because, if whatever weird and strange and semi-impossible thing is happening between the pages of No Vacancy, you can probably sleep a little bit safer knowing its strangeness will be held safe by the paper’s ink, by Rory Jeffers’ illustrations, and Jan Carson’s inventiveness and imagination.
Here to share more of her inventiveness and imagination is Jan Carson!
Congratulations to Jan, No Alibis Press, and go grab your books now!