Alexander Fiske-Harrison enjoys a ‘story slam’ at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Edinburgh Fringe is a place of youthful hopes, naive dreams and occasional flashes of genuine inspiration. Usually these turn out to be very much flashes in the pan. But not so last Friday night’s ‘story slam’ at the Southall: a contest of storytelling between writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells divided into two teams, representing their home cities of Edinburgh and Chicago.

The idea grew out of the ‘poetry slam’ format, invented in Chicago in 1980s, which was itself the child — or rather, the polite third cousin — of the ‘rap battle’ wars of words, in which aspiring hip-hop performers would twist language, rhythm and rhyme into weapons to wound an opponent’s amour-propre.

So it is perhaps not surprising that a prose variant of this combative form should also come out of Chicago, and that the founder of the ‘Windy City Story Slam’ should be Bill Hillman, a former Chicago Golden Gloves-winning amateur boxer, who is also a graduate of the creative writing course of Columbia College, Chicago.