Festival ahoy!

We're gearing up here in Cheltenham for the Poetry Festival, now only a couple of weeks away. And the advertising certainly isn't exaggerating when it says that this year's Festival is the "most diverse and exciting we've yet produced"! There are special student offers on selected sessions and workshop offers too; the workshops (this year to be run by John Hegley, David Clarke, Michael Scott and Ben Parker) are always a popular feature of the festival and are usually oversubscribed. Do look at the website to see what an amazing breadth of poetry is on offer and join us if you can. The Guardian once called the Festival "a poetry party with a healthy dose of anarchy" and it should definitely live up to that next month. 

I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Roy McFarlane (who has kindly agreed to be the poetry judge for the Gloucestershire Writers Network competition this year) and the John Goodby talk on Dylan Thomas. I'm event managing some sessions and I'll also be performing myself, as part of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Players; with Robin Gilbert, Frances March and Peter Wyton I'll be doing a series of readings on the theme of "Time" in the Lounge at the Playhouse Theatre on Monday May 8th at 20.30. We're covering a broad span, era and style-wise - it promises to be an interesting evening.  

  

When it's Spring again ...

Spring always brings out a childish excitement in me; walking in the woods and on the hills these last few days has been so invigorating.The lovely weather probably won't last for long, but I'm making the most of it whilst it's here! We saw our first bluebell out in Crickley Hill country park on Monday; by Wednesday the woodland floor was carpeted with them. Our first cowslip was on the foothills of Cleeve on Wednesday; singly they never look impressive but en masse they are beautiful and I'm so looking forward to the lemon-yellow haze that will follow there in a few days time.

Violets in the woods
at Crickley

And spring is such a great time for people-watching! At this time of the year they seem to emerge blinking into the sunlight after the long winter's hibernation - pavement cafes are busy again, the gardeners are out in force and children are playing in the parks. I've just started a series of very short poems - snapshots really - inspired by glimpses of people in all sorts of settings. I've always built stories in my head around the man opposite me in the train, staring mournfully out of the window, or the married couple sitting in silence over their meal in a restaurant, and many have made it on to paper. I sometimes wonder what on earth the subjects would make of them if they were ever to read them!

Young Couple At Bristol Parkway 

Stations bookend their loving,
open and close each chapter.

Stranded on a draughty platform
thirty years on,
she'll re-read the romance.  

(Copyright Gill Garrett, 2017)

Gloucestershire Writers' Network

It's been a busy and an interesting week here. A small group of us have taken over the organisation of the Gloucestershire Writers' Network from Rona Laycock, who has run it very competently for the past six years. The annual highlight is the competition, which feeds into the Cheltenham Literature Festival; in addition to receiving monetary prizes, the winners and runners-up in the prose and poetry categories read at a special event at the Festival, one of the most prestigious on the national circuit. I've benefited hugely from my successful association with the competition over the last five years; it has opened up so many writing opportunities for me, so I'm delighted to be able to do something in return.

This week we've been talking about the competition on BBC Radio Gloucestershire and featuring in the Gloucestershire Echo. We're very anxious to have as wide an entry as possible from writers who live or work in the county - so if you're reading this and are Gloucestershire based, how about a poem or two or a short story on the theme of "Who Do We Think We Are?" by July 29th?! You can interpret the theme as widely as you like. Poems can be up to 50 lines, prose up to 750 words. The entry fee is a very modest £2.50 per item. A very generous donation has enabled us to offer two prizes of £200 this year, one for the winning poem, one for the winning prose - so it's worth having a shot at it!

The anthology of last year's
winning entries

You can find further details about entering on the following link - www.facebook.com/groups/GlosWriters

Readings and Records

It was a really good evening at Smokey Joes on Wednesday at Poetry Cafe Refreshed. Jennie Farley read beautifully from her collection "My Grandmother Skating". Her poems are alive with lovers and wolves, cousins and monkeys, riding in horse-drawn carriages, seeking sanctuary in churches, playing with peg dolls in allotments - closely drawn characters in richly imagined landscapes as disparate as pre-revolutionary Russia and the family home territory of Lincolnshire. But I particularly enjoyed a preview of her new "gymslip" poems about her boarding school days; I look forward to hearing, and eventually reading, many more of those.

Jennie Farley

Then yesterday morning saw a group of us examining material from the Gloucester archives - a fascinating exercise. The documents (including court records, school logbooks, county asylum admission registers) are invaluable resources for historians, of course - but have so much potential for creative writers too. In the prison and asylum records from the early Victorian period - the days before photography and the "mug shots" with which we're all familiar - physical descriptions were carefully noted down. These added "flesh" to the names - the Josiahs and Felicias, the Malachis and the Emmelines - and a small leap of the imagination took you into their worlds of truanting, petty theft, acute mania or "moral danger". Rich pickings indeed for poets and story-tellers!

World Poetry Day

Happy World Poetry Day! Irina Bokova, the Director General of UNESCO, which nominated March 21st for the annual celebration back in 1999, writes that "Poetry is a window into the breath-taking diversity of humanity". Certainly every culture on the planet has its poetic tradition and practice, oral or written. Sadly, in Britain we seem to be less concerned with poetry in our everyday lives today than were our predecessors; perhaps days like today, appropriately acknowledged in the media, in our schools and community centres could go some way towards redressing this?

A small step yesterday was Radio 4's broadcasts of short poems at intervals throughout the day to celebrate the spring equinox. Perhaps someone turning on the news caught a few lines that made them think - maybe Philip Larkin's "The recent buds relax and spread / their greenness in a kind of grief" or Alice Oswald's "Birch, oak, rowan,ash / Chinese-whispering the change". You can hear all of the poems there were broadcast at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3yfnHlQT7vscVl7N2Zl9nYm/four-seasons-poetry-for-the-spring-equinox

And tomorrow evening at Smokey Joes in Bennington Street here in Cheltenham, Jennie Farley will be the guest poet at Poetry Cafe Refreshed. A really atmospheric venue and the promise of some great poems - 7pm if you can make it. Come and celebrate poetry with us!

"Can I believe there is a heavenlier world
than this?" Charlotte Mew

International Women's Day 2017

Yesterday saw women unite worldwide for International Women's Day. In many places this was to protest, to strike - against economic inequality, domestic violence, withholding of reproductive rights and so many more gender-based issues - but it was also to celebrate female achievement in all spheres of life. Events great and small brought women together and to the fore - in Italy they were given free access to all museums and cultural sites showcasing art by and about women; on a more local level, here in Cheltenham women gave a celebratory poetry reading at the University of Gloucestershire.

I was very struck by a quote from Malala Yousafzai: "I raise up my voice - not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard .. we cannot succeed when half of us are held back." It seems to me that women writers have a particular responsibility here, to use their skills and opportunities to bring out those voices that will not otherwise be heard. We may think that it's hard enough sometimes in countries that do boast "equality" to get our own voices acknowledged (even if they are heard!), but finding ways to help others speak, to raise their profile too, is surely a duty we should be only too pleased and ready to shoulder.

 

Poems and stories

A thoroughly enjoyable evening at Buzzwords on Sunday with the poet and writer Maggie Butt reading and running a short workshop. I was especially taken with some of her poems about the "enemy aliens" imprisoned in Alexandra Palace during the First World War - and amused by some from "Sancti Clandestini - Undercover Saints". I can't say I've ever given much thought before to the patron saints of ugly towns or careless cyclists!

And it was lovely to see so many schools celebrating World Book Day last week, with lots of children going to school dressed as characters from their favourite books. I think I was so fortunate in having a childhood steeped in stories, a bookcase groaning under the weight of children's classics and a well-stocked local library to visit every Saturday afternoon. I still have many of the books from my childhood, read to my children in turn - and held on to perhaps for their children too! Fashions may have changed a bit in content, but many stories are timeless and still give as much pleasure now as they did decades ago - Wind in the Willows, the Beatrix Potter books, the Tolkien sagas (the latter given a tremendous boost of course by the film versions). With the breadth of the curriculum required of them now, some schools seem to find little time to encourage reading for pleasure, which is such a tragedy. I feel that we really impoverish children's lives if that opportunity is lost.