This week has been National Story Telling Week; I've not been able to get to any of the live events that have abounded around the country but I've much enjoyed listening to several short stories on the radio and some of the collections that I have on CD. Philip Pullman's quote "After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the things we need most in the world" certainly rings true for me - from childhood I've been entranced by the power of well-told tales. At one point when my children were young, we had long drives to and from school and they too became avid listeners to tapes of folk stories, myths and legends and later became great readers of them. How important it is that, despite the overloaded curricula schools now struggle with, some time is still given to story telling!
And a real "find" this week. For the times when I'm living "over the border" in the Wye Valley, I've just discovered some wonderful poetry sessions not too far away in Hereford, run by Sara-Jane Arbury as part of the Ledbury Poetry Festival outreach programme. Yesterday I spent the morning at the Women4Women group and thoroughly enjoyed it; I'm really looking forward to continuing my involvement there. In the meantime I'm at last completing the "Fragments" project that has taken rather longer than I anticipated! I'm delighted that one of the poems from the collection, "Morning Service", will appear in Snakeskin, the on-line poetry zine, which this month is dedicated to "Portraits". There's some really interesting poetry in Snakeskin - do check it out if you're not familiar with the site. I only recently came across it but it's certainly well worth taking a look at.
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