Please join us to celebrate the launch of Helen Palmer’s debut novel, Pleasure Beach, at Blackpool’s Grand Theatre on Bloomsday, 16 June 2023.
Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened last night with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.
Time: 7pm, 16 June 2023
Place: Studio Space, Blackpool Grand Theatre, 33 Church St, Blackpool FY1 1HT
Tickets: £5
Featuring: Readings from the novel, plus special guests Amina Atiq and Auntie Climaxx
Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach is her first novel.
Amina Atiq is a freelance creative working across the cultural and educational sector; a published poet, performance artist, practitioner and award-winning community activist. Anti-racism advisor for Curious Minds & Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse Theatres. BBC Words First Finalist, awarded Steve Biko Young Achievers, featured 100 Inspirational Women of Merseyside and Future List 2022 of Northern Woman awards. Artist fellow of DadaFest, Weston Jerwood Creative programme & Social Cohesion Fellow of Humboldt Foundation Residency. Poet in residence University College of London & Norfolk Ponds Project working on the secret Life of Ponds and of Museum of Colour, These Things Matter Exhibition. Artist fellow of Metal Culture producing a new upcoming creative campaign, HijabSpeaks. Lead writer & facilitator for the National Literacy Trust: Social Action Writing Project & Family Art Club for St Helens Culture Borough of Culture.
Website: www.aminaatiq.org; Instagram: aminaatiqartist
Auntie Climaxx… welcome to the stage! The drinking man’s crumpet (that got dropped on the barbershop floor)! Best known as Monkeypox patient zero and the heavy sweating hostess of Liverpool’s premier 3 course vegan drag dinner cabaret Eat Me, this bunion-ed beefcake looks forehead to entertaining the troops one last time before retirement. So if you enjoy mutton dressed as ham, men dressed as women, or simple salads dressed with lemon, you’ll probably enjoy this prancing pig in heels and a wig!
