Turquoise Monster

A recording of my song My Spanish Man.

A recording of the song The Winter’s Heart composed by me and my daughter Jean.

Recording of my song Somebody Please

Recording of my song At The Bottom of The Sea.

October has been crazy busy not least with the first ever Gloucester Poetry Festival run by the Gloucester Poetry Society. I performed, compared, made surprise pouches, gave out badges and run workshops. There are a lot of photos which I hope to get processed and out soonly but first I think I need a bit of a breather.

But before I disappear into hibernation here are some links 🙂

Gloucester Poetry Society and Festival website

Gloucester Poetry Society Facebook Page

Poetry Without Pretension – the first GPS poetry anthology is available here

Twitter

The first ever Gloucester Poetry Festival is almost upon us – Saturday (21st Oct 2017) sees events starting off with an extra special Food for Thoughts at the Cafe Rene 2-5 pm. This is followed by the Gloucester Waterstones Villanelles on Sunday 2-4 pm complete with Poetry Roulette and me co-hosting!

Then on Thursday the Festival proper begins with a plethora of events 🙂 So check it out!

And then of course there is the really exciting news! The Gloucester Societies first ever poetry collection has arrived and is a gorgeous book!

Copies of Poetry Without Pretension will be at all the festival events and are also purchasable from my publishing group The WigglyPet Press.

Poetry pouches containing limited edition Poetry Festival 2017 badges will also be being given out at events until we run out!

Monday night I inflicted my childrens poetry on an audience in the Waterstones Cheltenham as part of the Villanelles series run by The Gloucester Poetry Society.

This beautiful photo of the reading was taken by Kurt Schroeder Photography which is a challenge as I can’t really do flash photography and the light levels were poor!

The The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry has been getting out and about again – Last weekend saw me take the baby yeti (Alaric) to Cheltenham Library along with El Nosy Rat for the Fun Palaces Event.

It’s interesting to note that the outfit Alaric is wearing is the reason there is a poem with the line “One Daddy dressed as a Yeti” in it and now he puts the outfit on for the poetry readings! It was originally made for a Yeti Hunt when we first started up the Cranham Scouting sections 🙂

At the poetry readings he is a naughty baby yeti who is also very shy and has a habit of hiding until the children call him to come out! This time the baby yeti stole Jean’s shoes! When I took him to the climbing wall he kept hanging upside down! That baby YETI!

El Nosy Rat also features in one of the poems which he is a bit disgruntled about as it feels it gives rats a bad name! He is a relatively new member of the performance team and is also known as Ratty The Plague Rat/Black Death Rat when he comes out on Cuddly Science outings 🙂

He is a big hit with the kids and talks with a bit of an Eastend twang. In the photo above he his holding on of the lovely cloth patches of the Mummy Eating Cherry Pie (one of the poems and illustrations from the book). I had these made last year and they are in some of my surprise pouches! These were made by White Wizard Purple Elf who also made Jean’s beautiful dark fairy hoody. Talking of surprise pouches I did kind of forget I they were also glitter bombs so covered the Children’s Library in glitter 0.o

Last year I also spent ages tracing some of the pictures from the book so that I could turn them into black and white colouring sheets. The idea is that eventually all the illustrations will be up for free down load and maybe even as an actual colouring book. I tend to be a bit slow going with this as I do a little bit every September and October. But it did mean that this year I had lots of pictures ready for digital clean up and conversion to colouring in sheets 🙂

I am steadily popping them all on WigglyPets Press – including the older ones I made which have some colour traits like the pumpkin outlines being orange 🙂

There are still quiet a few to be traced and scanned still but that along with new audio files will have to await my new computer!

And talking of audio files don’t forget you can listen to the poems on my bandcamp though it is still missing it’s story and song to be a proper collection 🙂

Or you can watch a much younger Jeany reading the poems and a baby Mary trying to join in 🙂

I only have about 20 of my original print run left, after they have gone the book will be a more expensive print on demand thing on Amazon. And a second volume is also wending it’s way to completion 🙂

But that will be a tale for another year!

But before I leave you I shall explain why it is the Spoogy book and not a Spooky book – when she was 4 yrs old Jean asked me if we could make a poetry book for halloween and so we did about topics she picked… that book was all hand drawn and written and did not contain all ten poems that later appeared in The Little Book it also got a cup of water knocked over on it shortly after it’s creation as Jean has it in her tray table next to her bed – the tray table where she was allowed her night time water as if it was spilt it would all stay in the tray!

The 4 yr old Jean could not say Spooky – 4 yr old Jean said Spoogy and the book was for her, I’ve been asked to change it for “proper” publication but the poems are what they are – first and for most for my kids and the Spoogy bit is an essential part of that. If you are interested here is the blog post from when I made the book back in 2009.

A recording of my song Little Ghost on Parade.

This photo is me performing at the 2015 Quiet Compere event on the eve of the Medicine Unboxed conference. Photo taken by Sarah Dixon aka the Quiet Compere!

This is a film/poem documenting how the large version of the Muse Monster Writing Game came into existence. I had a lot of fun making this a few years ago – it’s a bamboo flute I am playing for the sound track by the way.