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.

The Edinburgh venue for the event is the former dissection theatre of the university’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies, which provides a suitably sanguinary arena, and its 200 seats are sold out. This is not least because Hillman has stacked the deck in Chicago’s favour, not only by bringing over John Hemingway, author and grandson of Chicago’s most famous son, Ernest, but also a former Edinburgh heavyweight, Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting. Welsh moved to Chicago to teach creative writing at Bill’s alma mater before marrying a native girl and settling down.

Proceedings start with much swagger and swearing from the Master of Ceremonies, the Scottish comedian and actor Gavin Mitchell, who revs up an audience already in festival mood.