Litcrawl is Wellington’s coolest (best) literary event, a spectacular, jam-packed with ideas and showcases – and in 2018 I was lucky to be asked to be part of one of the events. Lucky. And shitting myself. Why not both?  The event was called Lit-Sync For Your Life and it featured three readers – I was one (the other two were the brilliant Pip Adam and the brilliant Tayi Tibble, if ever there was a case of a thorn betwixt two roses eh…) And in between each reader there was a drag performer. Basically we’d been given a song to respond to and we had to create a piece of work – essay, poem/s, story, song, etc – and we recited our work then the drag performer did their dance/routine to the song. It was crazy and fantastic. And it is without a doubt the most nervous I’ve ever been presenting work. I felt enormous pressure and had no idea if what I was serving up would work at all but it’s good to fly by the seat of your pants now and then.

So that was my Litcrawl experience. Then I went to the after-party and got hideously drunk and walked home photographing road cones, then took a piss on the inside of the front door once I made it to where I live. This was never going to go down well but we had my parents staying…because it was my kid’s birthday (and party) the next day. Real dog-box behaviour eh.

Oh yeah basically this is what I read on the night – I fashioned a story of sorts out of a sequence of poems, the song I’d been asked to respond to was If You Could Read My Mind. For some reason I still have my wristband from the event – tucked in the box with the (other) ticket stubs.
Stubs is an occasional feature here at Off The Tracks – looking back through the ticket-stub box and remembering how the show went down.