It was a week ago but I have only just recovered.  The seminar in Coimbra, central Portugal, had been the brainchild of Alberto Gaspar - the president of the Portuguese association for teachers of English, APPI (Associação Portuguesa de Professores de Inglês : www.appi.pt) The idea had been to make a 'thing' about Portugal having become something of a showcase for using literature in the English language classroom - it was where the BritLit project started and flourished first - and to celebrate what had in five years turned from an 'oh no, not extended reading again' attitude amongst teachers to 'literature in my classroom?  Yes please, let's have more' attitude.  Ooh yes, very impressive!

We decided to invite Francesca Beard (performance poet www.francescabeard.com) and Melvin Burgess (www.melvinburgess.net).  Francesca is a mean poet and even meaner performer and I knew, just knew, that she would take hold of the delegates and make their day suddenly worth living.  That's why we decided to start with her.  Melvin is the bad boy of teenage literature, and is always getting himself into trouble with his books  - if he isn't writing about drugs and prostitution then he seems to be writing about teenage sex and dysfunctional families.  Ooh dear me no, not the kind of thing that those who would like to maintain the myth that life is all wonderful and hunky dory for everyone want to read about at all.  Melvin doesn't mess about any more than Francesca does and straight to the heart of the matter is what we can expect.  Lovely stuff.

Alberto and I ended up by being the main event organisers which is fine, and I was beginning to think I had the lucky pick of the straw when I reflected on Alberto having a group of willing hands to help from APPI while I was in a department of 1 plus one tenth of a person to put my end together.  Then I realised I had foolishly committed myself to not only managing the event but agreeing to do the 'with' part of the 'Melvin Burgess in conversation with' event in the morning , and then give a workshop on 'Words beyond Texts' in the afternoon.  Sucker!

Then Joe P comes along and says that the event would be perfect for initiating the British Council 'Second Life' (2L) performances in the public space and library on the BC 2L island.  Now I'm not a complete technophobe and I have been logged on to 2L for about 2 years (though not very actively, it must be said: I walk into walls even now, or fall off cliffs, or fly into buildings.  Ouch!) but I wasn't completely convinced it would work.  In fact I was quite cynical about it.  But, hey, APPI seemed pleased about the idea and the two writers were quite chipper about it too.

In the end it was hugely enjoyable.  The audience - a capacity crowd of English teachers in the Tryp Hotel in Coimbra - quickly got into the idea of a virtual audience and performance being played out in real time in front of their eyes.  There was a little resentment about the screen showing what was happening on 2L being directly behind the speakers, but this was mainly from old fogeys like myself who haven't yet mastered the technique of doing a zillion things at the same time which the younger members of the audience had no problems with (listening, writing, reading, blogging and no doubt listening to iPods as well) and the two main presenters, Melvin and Francesca, who were very much aware that half the audience at any one time were looking past them and to what was happening on the screen, which they couldn't see.  Positive in that the 'other' conversations that were going on (in script) on the screen were being fed back into the live audience and there was a reciprocal reaction going on.  There were issues to sort out concerning the presenters being more engaged in what the audience were experiencing, a post mortem decided, and there were issues about what you could talk about and how the confidentiality that we normally associate with a closed room can be dealt with.  But we're willing to give a try again and look forward to seeing how this might happen again.

I went on give my workshop- graphic novels, poetry and film and hyperfiction (you can see some of the ideas here on Transform - Using Literature) - and the afternoon was horribly hot and the room was immensely crowded but it was a lot of fun and, do you know, I think some people might even have learned something.

What we didn't know was that it was virtually the last day of summer in Portugal - October 31.  By November 1 it was raining and the temperature had dropped.  A week later and I am beginning to think that finding the jumpers I stored last spring would be a good idea.  A week later and neither Francesca nor Melvin are sure they will use their avatars again, though they enjoyed the experience.  Perhaps they are just going under cover and will pop up on 2L and you won't know who they are.  That's what I do - except that you can always tell who I am - the one who flies into walls and falls off cliffs.  Damnation!

Fitch