Continuing on with Outburst Book Group facilitated by local poet Mícheál McCann, The next book we’ll be reading is The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

“In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.”

Why don’t you pop on over to the lovey new queer book shop PaperxClips and pick up a copy?

Having trouble getting yourself the book for any reason? Send our Assistant Producer Marc an e-mail over at marc@outburstarts.com and we’ll get a free copy into your hands.

The Outburst Book Group is back in-person for the first time this year on Sunday 17th July at 3pm facilitated by local writer Mícheál McCann

From new novels to queer classics, we read books that are a great conversation starter around queer experience and ideas, about where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. We meet once a month and you can come every time or just once if you fancy it.

It’s totally FREE and everyone is welcome, no special knowledge needed! You just need to read the book in advance.

If you can’t find or afford the book, just email participate@outburstarts.com and we’ll sort something.

This time we’re reading LOT by Bryan Washington – an entralling collection of interelated short stories about a young gay man finding his place “with soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life“.

Venue is the Outburst HQ in Belfast City Centre, full details when you book your place via our website, link in bio.

(Venue has wheelchair access, all gender loo and free refreshments)

Any questions, feel free to drop us a message. See you there!

In the city of Houston – a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America – the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston’s myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman’s affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Here, kitty kitty! Have you been feeling the queer lit itch that you just can’t scratch? Outburst’s stunning Reading Group and Book Group returns this year facilitated by your friendly neighbourhood queer poet extraordinaire, Mícheál McCann!

Details about our Book Group will be announced shortly, but for those not in the know, our Reading Group is where once a month, we dig into theories that help us to see the world around us, and our place in it, in a different way.

We’re kicking this group off on 15th June at 7:00pm – 8:30pm online with a chapter from Shon Faye’s stunning work “The Transgender Issue”, debunking the media frenzy of transphobic hit pieces and asking us where we begin to understand what it means to be trans in the UK.

“Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war ‘issue’. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country’s population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized ‘debate’ which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the ‘transgender issue’ to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.”

The reading group is free and open to all, but there are limited places. So book now!

A periodical of smart new queer writing with a disco heart

Outburst Arts is pure excited to announce a brand new periodical of queer writing, with the launch issue dropping at Outburst Queer Arts Festival in November 2021. For our first issue we’re inviting some writers we know and love to share work and ideas and also leaving it wide open to new and established voices who would like to submit. We love surprises.

This is a non-academic periodical , making space for exciting new queer thinking, hits of literary goodness and accessible commentary on queer art, culture and ideas that there currently isn’t a platform for here.

Edited by poet Mícheál McCann, this is a publication that doesn’t compromise on big ideas in queer thinking. There’s space for everything from poetry to journalistic think pieces, long form essays to cultural reviews that will intersect and speak to our current moment. Anything that will expand our thinking, conversations and creativity in new and energising directions.

For the first issue of this publication we’re inviting you to explore queer joy. After the year that’s been in it, we could do with some meditation on queer joy, which has a history of persisting despite efforts to quell it. What does radical queer happiness look like? When so many ways and places we connect have been disrupted, where do we find our queer delight in connection?  How and where is joy found in the body, in queer space, in the everyday, in community, in dancing, in kinship, in gentle transgression and bold imaginings?

Let’s see where we can take this. We would love to read your:

—  long and short-form non-fiction (essays; commentary; think pieces up to 3,000 words, or else a 300 word pitch to the editor; pieces as short as 500-750 are welcome too! think micro-reviews, postcards or cultural diaries)

—  poetry (2-3 pages of poems, up to 40 lines each; if in-translation, please include original [and have the rights to reproduce])

Please send all work and to micheal@outburstarts.com as a Word document or .PDF, alongside a short artist/writer biog (no more than 100 words). If you are submitting a pitch, please attach examples / links to existing writing. Simultaneous submission of your work elsewhere is fine, but please inform Mícheál if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

Contributors will be paid for their work.

Deadline for submission: July 9th 2021.

PHOTO ID: A wooden ladder is held up against a grubby white-wash building. One individual at the top of the ladder holds a pink triangle in their left hand while the right clings onto a metal grille. Three people are at the bottom of the ladder; two steady it while a third in a vivaciously yellow jumper and white bowling shoes directs the person hanging the pink triangle. Their hands and arms are posed at jaunty angles, as though they are posing a model or a photograph.

Photo credit: 1981 Don Woods, from the LGBT History Archive. Erection of pink triangle at Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin.

“that night, they were not divided”…

For May’s bookgroup we’re reading Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking classic novel The Well of Loneliness. Published in 1928, the book was swiftly banned from print for ‘obscenity’ reasons, only re-emerging into print in 1948. Despite being initially praised for its bravery and countercultural approach, it was soon railed against by various institutional, male critics. James Douglas (then editor of the Sunday Express) wrote:“In order to prevent the contamination and corruption of English fiction it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.” Meow.

Offering the first direct exploration of lesbian experience in fiction (Hall was referred to as “our Matron Saint”) the novel is part protest against queer subjugation, part manifesto for rights, as well as an incredibly important step toward the representation of homosexuality and lesbian women in particular. Many are revisiting and rereading The Well recently and exploring how the novel can be read in relation to trans masc and non-binary experience alongside lesbian experience.

The book is now, thankfully, wildly available in print, but please get in touch if you have any trouble finding or affording it and we can help!

Email: (micheal@outburstarts.com)

Outburst’s book group explores classic and contemporary queer books and ideas, sharing exciting writing that introduces and explores queer themes. From James Baldwin and Radclyffe Hall to Torrey Peters and Paul Mendez, we mix it up between the queer past and queer present,  tones and themes, always sharing work that will get us talking! We meet about every six weeks to discuss a new book in a welcoming and friendly setting that’s open to everyone. For the moment the reading group is online, but we hope to be able to gather in person as well soon!

Image ID: An iconic painting by lesbian artist Hannah Gluckstein, or Gluck, that was used as the cover of the Virago Press edition of this book.  It’s a sparse, close up, double head-and-shoulders portrait of two androgenous female / masc figures in profile close together, both with strong features and looking to left of picture. One has short, dark,  combed back hair and looks straight ahead. The other has wavy short blonde hair, also combed back, and is looking upwards. There is nothing else in the picture except the figures against a grey background. It feels very powerful and mysterious.

**reading and talking together**

Yes, Outburst already has a book group where we read the best in queer fiction, but we also now have a reading group where we dig into theories that help us to see the world around us, and our place in it, in a different way (we can see queerly now!).

These reading group events will provide an informal, friendly and social atmosphere in which to explore challenging and compelling texts and ideas, There’s no need to prepare in advance. We will read and discuss one short text (e.g. one chapter of a book, an essay, etc.) together for each session.

We’re kicking this group off on 22 April with Sarah Schulman’s ‘The Gentrification of the Mind’…a vivid and accessible account of what queer culture has lost in recent decades.

“In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism.”

“‘The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination’, reckons with the intellectual and spiritual consequences of this displacement… “Gentrification,” Schulman said recently in an interview on WNYC, “was not caused by individuals. It was the process of city policy.” A moratorium on construction of low-income housing and tax incentives for luxury developers combined to create severely class-stratified neighborhoods where anyone with less than significant wealth has limited options for where to live. For white newcomers to the city who can’t afford much, that often means renting an apartment in a neighborhood that doesn’t have many people who look like you.

But in Schulman’s telling, the struggle over real estate is only the most obvious side of the story. As gentrification reshapes people’s understanding of the urban experience, the damage goes deeper; the mind itself, she argues, becomes gentrified. “Spiritually,” she writes, “gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity — the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together.” That lost mix was once the fuel for new art and new politics. Gentrification restricts the availability and viability of new and inventive forms of thought, art, and politics.” – Emily Douglas, LARB

Image credit: David Wojnarowicz, ‘Burning House’, 1981
Spray paint on cardstock stencil

Image description: A stencil of a simplified image in red and white of a small house with flames coming out of the windows.

What would happen if we took seriously the perspectives of trans people, and allowed them to potentially transform how we see the whole of gender? – Mackenzie Warke

Up next in Outburst book group: Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, one of the most talked about queer books of the year. We’ll meet over Zoom at 7pm on 13 April to chat informally over a cup of tea or a glass of wine…we’d love for you to join the discussion!

They say:

Irresistible … Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel’ Grace Lavery, Guardian
‘A voraciously knowing, compulsively readable novel’ Chris Kraus
‘Tremendously funny and sexy as hell’ Juliet Jacques

The book group is free and open to all, but there are limited places. Please book your ticket below and we’ll send you the link to meet us online.

Outburst’s book group explores classic and contemporary queer books and ideas. We want to share accessible, exciting fiction (and more) that introduces queer themes, creative forms, and ways of being…and think about how these ideas relate to the queer futures we imagine for ourselves. We meet roughly every 5 or 6 weeks to discuss a new book in a welcoming and friendly setting. For the moment, our meeting place will be online, but in the future it will be in a city-centre Belfast location.

If you have any trouble finding/affording the book, please get in touch (participate(at)outburstarts.com) and we can help out!

ID: A cropped photo of the book cover, with the title on bright green, orange and pink drawn shapes including stylised faces.

Up next: James Baldwin’s queer classic novel, Giovanni’s Room, exploring queer desire, shame, and the writer’s own sense of self. Outburst’s book group returns on 19 January at 7pm, join us!

“Baldwin’s haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.”

The book group is free and open to all, but there are limited places. Please let us know you’re planning to attend by emailing participate@outburstarts.com and we can send you the link to meet us online.

Outburst’s book group explores classic and contemporary queer books and ideas. We want to share accessible, exciting fiction (and more) that introduces queer themes, creative forms, and ways of being…and think about how these ideas relate to the queer futures we imagine for ourselves. We meet roughly every 5 or 6 weeks to discuss a new book in a welcoming and friendly setting. For the moment, our meeting place will be online, but in the future it will be in a city-centre Belfast location.

If you have any trouble finding/affording the book, please get in touch (participate(at)outburstarts.com) and we can help out!