A few years back I came across the poet Salena Godden, I believe the point at which she locked into my brain as someone to listen/read was a poem about tit being more or less feminist than each other 🙂 the poem kept being taken down off of the various sharing platforms and I was tagged by a mutual friend who thought I would like it – and I did and I have since seen her at some of the festival and events I have ended up at.
Back in 2012 to my amazement I ended up performing in Gloucester Cathedral – this was just at the point where in Russia Pussy Riot had been jailed for performing in a church.
This is a video of my performance and my little speech about being lucky.
This book in by the amazingly multi-talented poet, writer etc… AF Harold who I first met through Anna Saunders who started the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I have performed with AF a couple of times and it has always been an amazing pleasure.
From kids to grown ups he can captivate and entertain. Basically go get the book you wont regret it – it’s gettable here:
Tonight I am In The Slammer the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Slam with a host of fab poets at the Playhouse Theatre, Saturday I’ll be in the Cafe Rene Gloucester for more poetry with Food For Thoughts and Sunday I will be back over into Cheltenham for more Poetry Festival goodness in the Waterstones! Tuesday I’ll be back at the Rene and Saturday in the Brewery Gloucester for Pint of Prose, then I’m running a workshop on the 25th at the Fountain Inn Gloucester and then spouting some sea shanty poetry at the tall ship festival and then back to the Cheltenham Waterstones! May has been a pretty poetic month!
This was the Patreon Bundle for Love: A Stranger Dream when it was first launched 🙂 I thinking of adding some amendments and launching it as a deluxe bundle.
Thursday 27th of April Villanells Gloucester Fountain Inn from 7-11 pm – I am running a workshop at the beginning of the evening followed by recording performances and interviews organised by The Gloucester Poetry Society
Saturday 29th of April ReneGade Festival 2017 3 -1:30 pm which is opening with Food For Thoughts Poetry performance
May 4th – 15th Cheltenham Poetry Festival, I’ll be in the Slam Friday 12th May 8:30 but will be generally about the place 🙂
Saturday 20th of May A Pint of Prose organised by the Gloucester Poetry Festival
Plus as many regular nights as I can get too 🙂 Feeling very excited!!! (there might be another slam as well but it just depends on fitting things in!)
Regular Poetry events in Gloucester and Cheltenham are:
Buzzwords 1st Sunday of every month in Cheltenham
Speakeasy 1st Tuesday of every month in Gloucester
Waterstones Poetry Night Monday evenings in Cheltenham
Poetry Cafe 2nd Wednesday of the month in Cheltenham
Food For Thoughts variable but during the afternoon once a month at the weekend in Gloucester
Villanelles last Thursday of every Month in Gloucester
Cheltenham Poetry Societies Kickstart Workshops 1st Tuesday of the month in Cheltenham
Jam Back at the Tav every Wednesday evening primarily music but accepts spoken word in Cheltenham
Exciting poetry things are a foot in Gloucester (UK) at the moment – one such thing is the night Villanelles at the Fountain Inn. The night includes recording poetry for the Gloucester Poetry Societies Youtube channel, an open mic and… starting with this coming event… workshops 🙂
Which a few of us will be running – I am running the next one on the 27th April 2017, the whole event is 7-11 with the workshop being at the beginning.
For those of you who can not make it to the physical event I will be making a digital archive of workshops, will much over lap with the WoPoWriMo site.
A few years ago I came across a rather novel publishing company – at the time crowd sourcing was still a relatively new thing. I was working at a music festival running workshops when my little girl spotted something of interest elsewhere on the festival grounds.
It turned out to be the QI Elves, we had seen them the year previously at the festival but as a small little aside in one of the bars with basically quiz machine games. This was different.
We all beat the QI elves with our questions/answers and won ourselves badged and I got an autographed photo. I can’t remember if it was that year or the next that they were sharing a tent with Unbound?
There were a series of author talks as well as the QI elves and lots of fun optical illusion stuff etc… to be honest I can’t remember which year was which nor which festival it was!
But we signed up to the crowd-sourced and funded publisher Unbound and got lots of badges.
Subsequent years we bought books, and saw Robert Llewellyn who does many things including writing books though obviously most people know his TV career. They have brought me poets and writers and the QI elves and I have watched the various projected get funding… or not. My husband has help celebs (ok well Alan Davis) find the right bit of the festival for their talks and I’ve asked lots of questions I would not have had the oppurtunity to do other wise.
Basically you vote by making a money pledge which gets refunded to you if the project you are backing fails. There are different reward tiers and it works really well for books that would never be considered by traditional publishers but need that little bit extra than most self publishers could manage.
So yeah we love this project and I thought I would just bring it to peoples attention 🙂
For the initial launch of Love: A Stranger Dream I made these little figurines out of polymer clay and beads. They are 3D colour representations of the little Shadowing Souls that appear through out the visual poem.
