A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell all exposé of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers – why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And all the while, character actors gather for the endless convention...
Guy Elston’s debut is a curious smorgasbord of personas, voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting ‘I’ questions its relation to itself. Wist, wit, and obsession rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner.
The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It’s something else.
"Guy Elston is a trickster, a modern-day Puck in an era where an imaginary King Arthur can’t stop checking his social media accounts. Whether taking on the voice of the whale that swallowed Jonah, a last cigarette, or a bird with a 'license to trill,' Elston impresses with anthropomorphic sleight-of-hand, imbuing The Character Actor Convention with a singular sense of devilry." – Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors
"These poems ransack the wardrobe department, literary canon, museum mile, and online discourse to brilliant effect. Their guises beguile and bemuse: they cosplay as a prize-winning pumpkin, a stick insect, a dream historian. In trippy time travel, they play cards with Napoleon, chess with Joan of Arc, and endure a first date with King Arthur ('This sword in the stone stuff is doing numbers'). Clickbait science factoids hatch into poems with legs and a thousand faces, ready for their closeups. Intensely clever, register-hopping, and erudite, The Character Actor Convention is a reverberating sonic marvel, steeped in insight and sneakily tender. 'How lucky we are to know how lucky we are.' Readers, you are truly in luck." – Kateri Lanthier, author of Siren
"What's certain is voice," quips one of the speakers in The Character Actor Convention, and voices certainly abound in this inventive, hilarious, and slyly wise collection. Masterfully channelling characters as varied as a gargantuan pumpkin with daddy issues, a traitorous ant aesthete, and an advocacy group of megalomaniacal microplastics, Guy Elston delves slantwise into the absurdities of our present and the disasters and solaces of our imagined futures. A lively and delightful debut!" – Catriona Wright, author of Continuity Errors