Tootally Wired at Central Library

An iconic Manchester-made fashion accessory is being celebrated in this one-off event at Central Library in conjunction with Manchester Histories Festival featuring specially commissioned brand-new creations by seven writers and artists responding to the history and culture of the Tootal scarf.

“Forget fast fashion – take a long look at an old favourite: the Tootal scarf” says the blurb, promising a deep dive into the famous silky, tassled and often paisley-patterned, designed and manufactured in Manchester since the 1930s.

Hear writers Wendy Allen, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Tom Jenks, Emily Oldfield and Nicholas Royle premiere their poems and stories live, and enjoy a brand-new performance by sound artist Gary Fisher as well as a showcase of Tootal-related short films selected from the North West Film Archive for the event.

Wendy Allen’s work has been published in The North, Poetry Ireland Review, bath magg, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Propel. Her debut pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird, was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep Books, and a second pamphlet, Portrait in Mustard, will be published by Seren later this year. Originally from the North West, Wendy is a PhD candidate at Manchester Met, researching the relationship between poetic practice and the sculptural practice of Barbara Hepworth. She co-hosts the podcast What We’ve Been Reading with Dr Charley Barnes.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is the author of prose collection Marine Drive (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and poetry pamphlets cache-cache (Contraband Books), a Poetry Book Society Winter 2022 Selection, Using Language (Invisible Hand Press) and Lune (Red Ceilings Press), a PBS Winter 2023 Selection. Her next pamphlet, Wanderland, will be published by Red Ceilings. She has been writer-in-residence at Manchester’s Victoria Baths and Ilkley Literature Festival, and she is a member of the Critics Collective at Manchester Poetry Library. She is also an editor, and worked for many years on fashion glossies and style titles including ELLE, Nova and Wallpaper.

David Gaffney is the author of the novels Never Never (2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (2017) and Out Of The Dark (2021), and the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry – The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) – and is working on a third. His latest short story collection, Concrete Fields, is out now with Salt Publishing, and a pamphlet, Whale, is just out with Osmosis Press.

Tom Jenks’ most recent books are Melamine (Red Ceilings Press), Rhubarb (Beir Bua Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a collaborative pangrammatic novel with Catherine Vidler, comprising 26 chapters of 26 sentences, each sentence including every letter of the alphabet. He is also a text artist, producing visualisations of works of literature, and edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects.

Emily Oldfield is a writer and poet whose work often explores the North of England, in particular the layers of time and touch embedded in the landscape. She is particularly interested in the imprint of the past upon the present and future of a place, and how we may experience this physically, when walking. Published poetry includes Grit (2020) and Calder (2023), informed by the Rossendale Valley and Calder Valley respectively, and she is working on a creative non-fiction book Scraps, exploring the Lancashire-Yorkshire edgelands on foot and through traditional food culture.

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and, forthcoming with Manchester’s Confingo Publishing, Paris Fantastique – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf.  In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as limited-edition chapbooks. He has been collecting Tootal scarves since the 1980s.

Gary Fisher is an artist and experimental composer working with sound in live, recording and installation settings through investigatory responses to objects, images, words, places and actions. His current practice involves treating sounds as raw materials and materials as potential sound-makers. He performs live using free improvisatory techniques and employing found sounds, home-made electronics, purpose-built instruments, obsolete technology and all kinds of other methods, that combine noise, music and sound textures to form a coherent piece of sound that has structure and drama and engages with audiences in a playful and sometimes provocative manner.

Sarah-Clare Conlon and David Gaffney can also be seen performing watery words as part of this year’s Chorlton Book Festival, and Wendy Allen and Tom Jenks will be supporting Lydia Unsworth launch her new book at Peste on 11 September.