Turquoise Monster

Thursday the 12th of July last year saw me at the Grain Barge performing geek poetry, throwing knitting and inflicting my sense of humour on people. It took me a while to remember to post it! But it was an epic night and I did pop it up on my personal blog before but thought it should be shared here!

We turned up and there was some classical science equipment set up – which is always ‘ooooo do you think there will be fire and explosions and glowing stuff?’.

The show got started with the comedic Steve proclaiming he had super powers – he the guy who organises and entertains between the acts.

The first act was Jim Bell with his spiders which the brave Suze who is very scared of them, managed to hold momentarily with lots of squeaking.

Then it was time for the fire and glowing stuff but alas no explosions 🙁

Then it was on to Sophia with her set on why parents are so annoying.

At some point a red nose appeared just to remind me that Clowns exist shudders

Then we had Joe Wright and a very funny sketch and video about Darwin – including all the mistakes in the video 🙂

Then we had Nicole Slavin and opera about STIs.

We then had a break were instead of talking to the people who had come to see me I was hovering waiting for a laptop to work so that my first power point in 6 yrs could be shown and to make it worse it wasn’t actually a power point :/

But then we had the Science of Cocktails and me being me I announced to the room that I like the frothy head :/ Which Suze who was doing the talk gracefully sailed over.

Then there was Sam Phippen with his funny stories of Robots that kids build.

Then there was me – I was so nervous

Here is the video

And yes I corpsed and yes I got flustered and yes someone nicked my knitted bucky ball!

Then we had a talk on Viruses!

And then to finish off we had the halarious nerd rock of Mark Lewney.

Back in the autumn….

Via Centre Arts I met a lovely lady called Jenna Monroe who is a fantastic singer. I had wanted to do a workshop she was running but it was canceled so I have been on the look out for anything else she does. I can’t afford singing lessons at the moment but one off workshops are just about doable especially as I still had the money left from the first attempt.

The actual workshop was Vocal and Physical Improvisation with Jenna doing the vocal part and a man called Adam Fotheringham doing the physical part. I found the physical bit a tad taxing and had to sit out for large chunks which was a shame as I didn’t get to ‘let go’ of inhibitions and things in the same way as alot of the others could. I dare not jump with my pelvis still though I managed a lot and took part in all the ‘acting’ type exercises.

It was a lot more New Agey than I was expecting but that was good in some ways as it helped relax me into stuff which of course is the point of it. I have come away with some wonderful ideas for poems and stories and pictures to render. For me the best bit was an exercise were we all started off singing one thing and then other bits were added and we just sort of had to decide what we wanted to sing. I struggled with this right up until she told us to close our eyes, suddenly singing was easy, suddenly the sounds were there as ribbons around me and I could see where my ribbon, my voice needed to be woven into the pattern (metaphor obviously). It was the same a singing to the girls, there was nothing other than the sound and the hum and the harmonics of the voices mingling and mixing.

When we had finished this exercise I felt really serene and happy to take part in the rest of the activities. I had been very nervous about going to it to be honest. Later on there was another vocal exercise where we lay on the floor and then took it in turns to wander around the room singing. There was some real tribal, old, folky stuff coming out and then I got up and sang the first thing that came into my head and as I was confronted by a dark room with people laying down I just automatically started singing the Lullaby I made up for Jeany and that me and Al sing to the girls still.

I felt I learnt a lot and it was a fun afternoon, the activities when on a bit too long for my staying in one postition pain threshold but it was worth it 🙂

As I was singing the sun was setting and the sky was lavender and pink tinged, the light coming into the room had been amazing all day with trees autumn leaves fluttering down, first in sunlight, then in winter cloud glow and then through a condensation haze that settled on the windows like snow flurries. I eat cake and drank tea and at the end before the lights were switched on I took a photo of the candle that had been the only light as the sun set – I just thought it looked excellent and yes my head was very Bill and Ted when I emerged.

Being nervous and sky these sorts of workshops are invaluable to me. I am finding myself increasingly on stage and though two years ago if I went to read I was the best stage presence (not the same as the best poet!). I am now going to event where I am the worst performer (not the same as worst poet! Not that I really feel poetry can be gaged like that) and I have always wanted to sing on stage. I miss singing in Choirs and Musical Theatre Society etc…

I really enjoyed it plus I discovered there is a cute dinky little hall hidden away in Painswick.

I decided it was time to get some postcards and stickers made, I used moo.com which isn’t the cheapest but is the most accessible for what I wanted plus they had a sale!

I needed stickers for the Poetry Writing Challenge I am running and then I needed postcards for the Science-Art Exhibition I was running at Centre Arts in March, plus I wanted to give little copies of my Inspira pictures to friends who were struggling with various things in their lives.

I have been over the moon with them – people have been saying I should be selling them but not entirely sure where to do that for best affect at the moment.

Something I forgot to mention in my previous post about the Art Exhibition was that people were surprised at how much of it was mine with comments such as, ‘I would never have thought those pieces were by the same artist’ and ‘wow that’s a lot of variation in style.’

People who actually know me could pick out which ones weren’t mine with the comment that there was something me about all my pictures. It was mainly the fractals that gave them a pause for thought with, ‘They aren’t yours are they?’ No they were Alaric’s – my husbands but I chose the selection and no they weren’t digital renders of my ‘fractal style drawings’ though that mistake was understandable.

Again I am against the concept that you should choose one specific thing to be your style at least for a couple of years at a time. People expect artists to have phases what they don’t seem to be able to cope with is someone who takes photos in the morning, draws in felt pen in the afternoon and knits in the evening and then does painting at the weekends or someone who thinks that mediums and styles are something to understand and learn to add to a tool box of skills.

I love mixing things up as well.

And it is not just with the visual arts or the crafting it is my writing as well. It is hard to know what to push sometimes with me writing novels, short stories, flash fiction, essays, articles, how to stuff and some for adults and some for kids and kids groups in different ages and some of it needs my art and some of it doesn’t. And even within something like poetry I have several different types I write from political, to comedic to kids to sci-tech to gothic and abstract.

I love brining visuals and audio into these creations making them something multi media that I’m not sure there is a word for yet.

People who read alot of my stuff again say they can hear my voice in it all but many coming to it for the first time find it hard to connect me to such a lot of ‘voices’ and this makes it hard for them to recognise me.

Now people in the publishing and arts world and science for that matter have always told me I have to choice to get anything done. And I can see why but I am not like this because I haven’t thought about the consequences – I made a choice and that was to be ME and me is a person who likes and is interested in a lot of stuff and who has found it all feeds off of everything else.

I get a new skill it may get a bit rusty but it is easy enough to polish it up again if I need it or want to mix it with something else I now have.

And because I do all of these things I find myself being asked to do lots of strange and lovely and exiting things. Stuff that I wouldn’t have been ended up doing if I’d focused on one area.

In the last fortnight I have been described as someone who sits on the divide between art and science and who is a brilliant crafter and a teacher and I sing as well. Such glowing praise made me blush and hide behind my camera to take more photos. A poet and writer, an artist, a knitter and baker and a craft maker.

Then I had a moment when having had a lovely rejection, a not so lovely one and an acceptance with editing and one without of poems and someone I respect as poet tells me I am an Experimental Poet – and I thought YES! that’s it isn’t it?

My voice, my style is experimental that’s my choice.

Now all I have to do is deal with the fact that not everybody is nice about achievement and some feel I am too prolific or a hack or any of a number of other things.

In April I went and performed in my fourth ever poetry slam – this time it was War of the Words at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. As typified by the other slams I came last but I am happy as I performed my best yet in my opinion. I did my poem Shy about selective mutalism and had many people including the other poets commenting on how good it was. There is a very graining video which I want to edit into something at the end of the festival – but here is the recording I did of the poem using the hammond organ last year.

There were some absolutely amazing performers including Spoz, Peter Wyton and Ben Norris.

I went to a sell out event at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival were Dan Sluman and Mark Burnhope both read out their amazing works. Both explored illness and life altering events as well as the obsession with death and sex and a myrraid of other topics. All sculpted into a lyrical wonder.

Also I found the black and white mode on the camera works at low light levels were as the colour setting is all grainy.

I remember first meeting Dan at poetry cafe when it was at the museum and art gallery a few years ago and have always found his work deeply moving.

Sadly there are not more of Mark as it was a sell out gig and I couldn’t move around to get pictures.

Dan’s book is Absence Has A Weight Of Its Own

And Mark’s is Snowboy

There was also an open mic before they started their reading – if you want to see any of the photos in a larger format just click on them.

And lastly – I love this photo I took of Mark listening to the poetry even though it came out a bit blurry.

I follow Clive Baker’s page on Facebook and he/his admin posted a piece on concept art surrounding his novel Weaveworld which is my favourite of his books and one I found important in my development as a reader and writer.

I read Weaveworld when I was thirteen/fourteen – it was a struggle and it was the second of what I think of as full length novels that I read, the first being The Eight. I pretty much had been on point horrors until then. I picked it up on a second hand book stall in Romford market whilst out with my friends Helen and Nikki – It was dark and scary and romantic and lovely and enchanting and it introduced me to Literature – before each section there are quotes and many of these I fell in love with and wrote out into my diary with illustrations, they are from the text book greats but at the time I had never heard of them, it was also the first time I saw poetry coupled so intensely with the prose of a book.

The story made me hungry for more stories and I moved on the James Herbert and Stephen King and Anne McCaffrey and a mirrade of others but the quotes made me want these other things and so I found a plethora of ancient and not so ancient writings that resonated with me and I began trying to craft complex multi-threaded stories, to think of stories within stories and to realise there a wealth of legends and histories around the globe I could ‘steal’ for my own writing. I would walk home from school with my nose stuck in these books and sleep on the floor of my bedroom as I’d filled the bed up with books from the school library, town library, charity shops and friends. I would set myself the task of reading more and more each day – I was in love with words and stories which had so recently been nothing but the bain of my life.

The memories of this washed over me as I saw the post on facebook. I am sitting here with the book that I last read at 21 – it has been lent to a lot of people and is starting to fall to pieces but I am wondering what I will make of it now? The way I used to choose books from the second hand book stall was to go in and close my eyes and see what book ‘called to me’ – this yielded a jem everytime though this is probably because I was always starting off in the speculative fiction (Horror, scifi, fantasy) section, The first book I got via this process was The Eight which years later proved to be a wonderous cross over of reading between me and Alaric. I love books – I now have a shelf devoted to Clive. I should read Weaveworld again.

Enunciating soundbites
For nihilistic consumption
By media masses
Leads too
Stressed out starlets with
Brains bashed forward
As they Sing down
Depressive destruction
Of their time

I did a poem a day writing challenge in April – it was exhausting as I wrote and wrote and wrote and started to create concepts for visual poetry that I want to make.

The amount of drawing that I now need to do to make these poems a proper reality is a little daunting but I suppose I should get on with it!

So that’s it for another year I suppose unless I decide to do more poetry writing madness in October and November as part of GothNoWriMo and NaNo 🙂

Lets just say there are an awful lot of Little Books of various poetries written and awaiting illustration, editing and so forth!

Unfortunately we only caught an hour or so of the final night party Poetry Riot of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival – but what an hour with Trevor Meaney (yes not good photos but light levels were really low by this point as was my energy!):

And the sadly hilarious Clayton Blizzard with his whispered poetry and folk/rap songs that you are either going to laugh or cry or both too.

It was great fun though we sadly missed Mark Neil performing though I almost crashed into him at the top of the stairs and said my normal hello and he responded with his (I can’t remember who you are) smile like normal 🙂 – Alaric appears to have transmogrified into Luke Skywalker from Return of the Jedi.

No really look!

I took embarrassing photos of the interns 🙂 (who should start a comedy show up!)

And I took arty pics of people taking much better pictures than me!

Other photos of events can be found at Write Out Loud and Bilt Photography (which is where my current profile picture on FB comes from!).

You can probably tell that I really really enjoyed the festival 🙂