The pain of exile versus the relief of having got away – both emotions run through J Fergus Evans' solo show, which tells the story of the performer's own upbringing in the American deep south.
Though it's full of handy hints about the dangers of living in Georgia (you can only outrun an alligator if you move in zigzags; it's best to check under the toilet seat in case a spider is lurking there), Evans suggests that it's not just the deadly copperhead snake or black bear that you should fear in these parts, particularly if you happen to be gay. Until 1998, under laws against sodomy, homosexuality was illegal in Georgia; gay people faced tougher penalties than necrophiliacs. In common with all but nine US states, same-sex marriages still remains unrecognised.
Evans, laidback and engaging, is like a travelling troubador, performing to small audiences (six when I saw the show) and transforming broom cupboards, boiler rooms and office spaces into tiny pieces of Georgia, complete with neon bar signs, hokey memorabilia and the twang of folksy music. You can taste the tang of bourbon on your lips and experience the sweet stickiness of peach juice on your chin as you get glimpses of homecoming queens and mean girls, misdirected kisses and drag artists, pipe bombs and hurricanes.
The show is suffused with both pain and nostalgia, but also something tougher and more resilient. And it creates a world so artfully that you leave the theatre swearing you've travelled to Georgia and back.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/mar/26/heart-hitchhiking-down-peachtree-street

The Manchester poetry scene has been enriched by a number of North Americans over the past 10 years. J Fergus Evans adds to the trove with a fine collection, On Euclid Avenue, published by Salford’s Flapjack Press.
Evans’ first collection carries the reflections of a mature and discerning writer who says what he wants to say economically and without fuss or polemic. If that makes it sound a little detached, maybe it is. He is a forensic observer of people and places who occasionally forages into more intimate realms. This is not to say his work lacks passion, but it is largely a passion for small things, for the importance of everyday experience, and a compassion for the people who are players in it.
Place is a dominant theme in this collection. In a few lines the reader gets on intimate terms with Atlanta, Georgia, and its neighbourhoods. This includes afternoons spent appraising the bars and dives of Cabbagetown  where it’s “hot as sin and skin is on display” and “mosquitoes suck and hum and the air thrums with sex and danger”. It leads into Peachtree Street, where summer is “hot like a hammer” while “Autumn is a cool kiss on your cheek”.
Evans shows a transparent affection for his home city. In ‘The Hurricane’ layers of detail create a visceral sense of foreboding as “we waited, watched the air turn green”. The sky is “smudged charcoal”, the clouds are “coiled, tense, black as jungle cats”, the storm “sucks the light out of the air, then everything is plunged in violet.” He treats Manchester with similar grace in ‘What I Had To Hand’, where he takes to heart “the snap and crackle of your anarchy, the lisp and whisper of your canals” and calls it home.
However, Evans respects his characters as he does his locations. There are poems that feature his family, barflies, drag queens and strippers, and lovers. He mines familiar themes of adolescence, family conflict, home town entrapment and the lure of the “other” with a lightness of touch.
In ‘My Mother, The Queer Hero’ he gives 10 reasons for the appellation, but in truth he creates a complex and sympathetic biography in a few lines.  In ‘To My Father, Dearly Departed’, he writes:  “When I look inside I’ve let so much of you go” but “you still own half of me”.  His mother claims his father slept with a dictionary under his bed “to argue the meaning of words with me. Who else will love me like that?”, a powerful statement of reconciliation. The tensions of his adolescence may be illustrated by his grandmother who had a “face like a brown paper bag” and a tiny body “the size of a whisper” when she forces him to share her own public grief at the death of his grandfather and file his own “blood and beating heart feelings in the drawer marked less important”.
Like a Ry Cooder in Hollywood or Lou Reed in New York, Evans also throws sympathetic light on a bunch of downbeat characters from Atlanta’s demi-monde, including the stripper in ‘One Winter’ who makes “800 dollars an evening and manages to come home with 10 dollars in her pocket”. In ‘Fresh Peaches’, “Ol’ Nick from the Trackside Tavern loves Darla the bartender from Decatur”, but on a sticky night comes unstuck. When drunk he falls asleep “in the bed the train trestles make”, oblivious to his fate. Drag Queen Crow has a smile “she’s got to screw on tight at each corner”, and in ‘The One Where Crow Considers Leaving’, is a “wilted hibiscus, bruised jasmine, ….a flower bed going to seed” who just wants to fly away, while Midtown Mary, “a one man Pride parade”, teaches Atlanta to laugh and knows he’s already flying. Sailor and Lula pause at Moe’s for respite from their “cross country epic”, their skin “unspeakably pale against black cotton”, and Snow White, with the imprint of “burnt mahogany fingers pressing into the bruised vulnerable alabaster”, causes Evans to wonder at her fearlessness in ‘Maternal Feeling’.
His own relationships and sexuality are dealt with candidly, yet perhaps taking advice from Brooke in ‘Out Past The Football Fields’ he doesn’t rub any faces in it. In ‘Voodoo Sexy’ he captures timeless moments, drinking in the company of an unnamed friend who is as “cool as a copperhead snake”, “as mean as a wildcat on heat”. With Sharon who introduces him to quinoa, and tofu soaked in lime and chilli, he drives north to climb a few mountains and just revel in the whole experience, from “gas station snack foods” to “IMAX view of valley”, with “everything cool and green and brown and golden”.
Back in Manchester on an overcast day in autumn, drinking wine in Spider Park, “our lust is awkward as teenagers, spotty-faced and fumbling and I get a hard on just holding your hand”. However in ‘The Romantic’, Evans’ passions take an unexpected visceral turn, likening love to being split from chin to groin by God’s dirty fingernail. He wants to “ram grasping hands beneath the milk and putty surface of your skin … make a nest behind your solar plexus” and “swallow your heart whole”.
J Fergus Evans appears to be a poet who has come to terms with his past, values his experiences and is content at being in the present. ‘The Education’ states: “I am as naked as a blank page …  I am hungry now for things I never knew existed . The world feels new. My world feels new. You’ve done this to me.”  On Euclid Avenue appears to be the odyssey of a fulfilled man.   ‘I Wanna Make a Home In This Moment’  sees Evans seeking  to abandon the past and “leave behind the litany of mistakes”:
     I want to forget for a second the ghosts
     of Ferguses past and Ferguses yet to come,   
     listen to the drumbeat of my heart
     and a voice inside me booming:
     “Come inside and know me better, man.”
This man has produced a fine collection, and On Euclid Avenue deserves a wide readership.
Dave Morgan

https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=40213

My first full-length poetry collection On Euclid Ave is due to be released by Flapjack Press on 27 February 2012. Flapjack Press explores the synergy between the written and speoken word. publishes collections of poetry and prose, and runs workshops and live performance events throughout the northwest.
I’ll be joining a roster of some of the northwest’s leading spoken word artists, including Jackie Hagan, Gerry Potter, Ben Mellor and Dominic Berry.
'On Euclid Ave’ will be available for purchase online and in stores, and will also be available at each of the live performances of my new solo spoken word and storytelling show 'my heart is hitchhiking down peachtree street’

A review of Gender Theory, Judith Butler and Other Bedtime Stories at Manchester Mule.

Gender Theory, Judith Butler and Other Bedtime Stories is a thought-provoking piece by J. Fergus Evans, Gemma Bradley, and Jackie Hagan. Focusing on the experiences of Fergus and Gemma, two radical queers who are shocked to find themselves with mortgages and in monogamous relationships, the performance examines life after queer theory. Combining video interviews, songs, poetry, and spoken word, the performance asks questions such as ‘what is queer?’, and ‘what’s the queerest haircut you’ve ever had?’ Yet ultimately the performance does not provide definitive answers to these questions. Rather its beauty lies in the fact that, like the term queer, these answers are elusive, highly personal, and ever-changing. Refreshing in its honest rejection of fixed definition, this show is definitely one to watch out for.

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I am very excited to announce that I have had two poems included in 'Anarchism & Sexuality', published by Routledge Press. This new anthology edited by Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality through a combination of academic and creative texts.

More Info

Good news - I’ve just been informed that two of my poems ('The Hurricane' and 'On Euclid Avenue') will be featured in a new anthology by Bad Language.  Bad Language are a literary organisation based in Manchester who produce anthologies and host regular events for new writing.
I’m very excited to be part of their next collection!
For more information, visit: http://badlanguagemcr.co.uk/

Written and performed by spoken-word artist J. Fergus Evans, Rove is a tribute to folk music and an intimate exploration of family and belonging.

A blend of play, gig, poem, stand-up, memory and monologue, Rove fuses together these different traditions much like its creator, whose family heritage covers countries and continents. Evans grew up in the American South with a keen sense of his family’s Irish and American history, retold to him through stories, legends and “theories passed on as facts.” This show journeys through that history and questions what it means to belong.

His stories are interwoven with folk songs and accompanied by Rhiannon (Margaret) Armstrong, who quickly sets her stamp on the production as side-kick, friend and comedy partner to Evans with the wry line, “There’s not a lot to pass down in my family, so the eldest daughter gets the name Margaret.” Fergus himself is named after his grandfather’s surname, as a promise of remembrance to the family’s Irish homeland.

For lovers of folk music, the show has a great deal to offer: old favourites like “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Black Jack Davey” are performed with an understated, contemporary groove. Both performers sing, often accompanied by Armstrong’s violin (plus occasional shoes or a glass of water), which is brilliantly played with the use of a loop pedal to create layers of live sound. Bright green lighting renders the auditorium ethereal and other-worldly, as Evans’ and Armstrong’s voices bounce around the Bike Shed’s close brick walls.
The production is itself a little like a folk song, with verses and choruses, repeated lines and comic riffs. Segments of performance poetry narrate Rover Joe’s (a variation on Evans’ grandfather) experience of moving to Chicago and having to re-establish a sense of self, separated from all he knows by a vast expanse of ocean. Interspersed with Evans’ reflections on how memory works, we watch Rover Joe’s identity shift as he falls in love, becomes a father and passes on his heritage to his daughters.

While beautifully and poetically depicted in terms of appearance, some of the female characters in Evans’ stories lack dimension and personality: Rover Joe’s sweetheart is a waitress’ uniform and honey-coloured hair, but little more. In places too, the show’s quiet nostalgia verges on the underwhelming and, because it offers so many different performance styles, we don’t get quite enough of any of them. Rove is a buffet of different art forms, but this huge range within a performance of just over an hour renders it a little unsatisfying as a meal.
That said, the production is one that lingers thought-provokingly in the viewer’s mind after the final words have been spoken. The ending about-turns and addresses the (metaphorical) elephant that’s been lurking in the room since the show’s early moments, in a deeply affecting finale that throws a whole new set of questions onto Rove’s stories.
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http://www.thereviewshub.com/rove-the-bike-shed-theatre-exeter/

I am pleased to announce that my poem 'An Altogether Different Type of Romance' will be published in an upcoming Versus Anthology.