
THE CLEARING WITH KATHERINE MAY
The Mini-Break, episode 11: Katherine’s first time trying stand-up comedy
Follow @theclearingpod on Instagram for podcast videos and extras • Watch The Clearing Podcast episodes on YouTube • Listen to previous episodes here • Switch to an annual paid subscription to The Clearing and receive a digital copy of Notes & Fragments, a commonplace book • Begin or renew an annual subscription this month, and you’ll be automatically entered into a prize draw to win my writing essentials • My next book Tending: How Care Binds the World is out in March, and you can pre-order it here.
I have something completely different and really special for subscribers this week as I’ve recorded a daily audio diary over five days while attending my first ever stand-up comedy course in London.

Thrown together with a group of strangers and testing my social battery to the full, the course forced me to reflect on my own writing - in ways I wasn’t expecting.
As the week went on I found myself asking: what constitutes truth in memoir? I came to realise that comedians are more like novelists than memoirists, with an unspoken license to fabricate and play with the truth in ways I had not fully realised. By the end of the week I was starting to grapple with both the constraints of my chosen medium and self-inflicted constraints around what I see as ‘truth’.
You’ll hear insight into my writing practice along with some surprising revelations about how things could change going forwards. Best of all, I managed not to fall over on stage. Always a win.
Links from the episode:
I attended the Angel Comedy Club beginner’s course in London, run by Dec Munro (@decmunro_comedy).
You can find full details here… https://shorturl.at/QjZbs
Production Credits
Guest Booker and Admin Support - Meghan Hutchins
Substack Manager - Rebecca Armstrong
Producer - Alice Lloyd
Transcript:
Read this post with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Clearing with Katherine May to read this post and get 7 days access to the full archive
Upgrade
