Someone special

I've been fortunate in my life to meet some really special people, people who have inspired and supported me in many different areas - a very charismatic drama teacher at school, several nursing and medical colleagues during my working life, patients too, from whom I learned so much. But in terms of inspiration in my writing life, one person stands out - someone who has taught me, encouraged me, picked me up and dusted me off when things have not gone well and celebrated with me when they have. I owe an enormous debt to Rona Laycock and this week it's been a real pleasure to see her honoured for all the work she has done to further creative writing in Gloucestershire.

Rona with Catchword member Liz Carew

Monday saw a coffee morning in Cirencester to mark Rona's retirement from running Writers in the Brewery, the monthly event which she initiated and at which local writers have been able to meet, to listen to a variety of visiting poets and authors and also to share their own work at the open mic sessions. Ably assisted by her husband Dave - an excellent barman! - she ran the event for several years. Then at the Playhouse on Thursday she was recognised with a Cheltenham Arts Council award for her dedication in running the Gloucestershire Writers Network, particularly in organising the annual competition for the Cheltenham Literature Festival event and overseeing the evening itself. For many of us, reading at the Festival was our first experience of appearing on stage at a major literature event and it was Rona's hard work and encouragement that gave us the opportunity and the confidence to do so.

Rona with her husband at the Playhouse

Inevitably, giving so much of her time and energy to support other people has meant Rona's own work has had to be put on hold occasionally. Hopefully having handed over the baton to others will free her to pursue more of her own writing now. Next month I shall be working with my friend Clare Finnemore from Somewhere Else Writers to present In Focus on Corinium Radio with Rona as our subject. We'll be discussing her achievements and her present and future writing projects - I'll post details of when the programme will air as I'm sure she will most definitely be worth listening to!

Come and join us

Firstly, my thanks to two groups who have made me very welcome at their meetings this week - the Wye Valley Writers in Chepstow on Monday evening and the poetry group at Heffernan House in Hereford on Wednesday. They were both really interesting sessions, which I much enjoyed, and I look forward to spending more time with both groups in the future.

Now things are hotting up for this year's Cheltenham Poetry Festival. If you haven't booked up for events yet, you'll need to do so quickly - tickets are going very well. There's a tremendous variety of things on offer - workshops with David Clarke, Alicia Stubbersfield and Roz Goddard, an exploration of poetry film with Elephant's Footprint, readings by so many gifted poets - including two of my poetry group colleagues, Christine Griffin and Belinda Rimmer. Christine is reading with Owen Lowry on April 28th and Belinda with Gill McEvoy on April 29th. I'll be reading with the Poetry Festival Players at the Cheltenham Playhouse on Tuesday April 24th at 5pm; we'll be performing a wonderful selection of poems expressing "The Power of Words" and we'd love you to join us to hear them! You can find details of all the events, booking etc. on the Festival website.

"Made Strange By Time"

It was a great delight earlier this week to at last get a copy of "Made Strange By Time", the first poetry collection by my friend and Catchword colleague Derek Healy. I've followed its genesis and maturation with great interest and it's lovely to have the finished product to read at leisure. As a reviewer comments, the poems demand repeated reading; there are subtle layers of meaning in seemingly simple lines, lines that owe much to Derek's deft use of the traditional poetic forms which he particularly favours.

I very much enjoy poems that evoke a strong sense of time and place, features that lead into the heart of the subject matter. A particular favourite of mine from Derek's collection is "Weston Beach" where "... our foursome / made its camp, between the pier and Lido / spilling tea and sandwiches in the sand"; the word sketch of his mother as "... stockings off and hoisted skirt / forgetting us she'd wander down the shore" to wade out "lost in some other world beyond my grasp" draws for me such a poignant picture of a 1950s mother. Similarly, "At The Pictures" conjures up so well the tortured memories of anxious adolescent longings, unfulfilled, regretted - "... if only we'd imagined being old / one day, passing each other in the street / as strangers would, without a glance".  But not all the poems look back on the writer's "... change / from boyhood to a grown up life".  The theme of time is carried forward into a sometimes perplexing present and an uncertain future. I find it a path well worth travelling, at times gently comic, sometimes surprising and always thought-provoking.

Available via the Matador website at £6.99

Poems from the heart

Phillippa Slinger introduces
the Speakeasy event

To mark International Women's Day, I visited the Speakeasy at the Left Bank Centre in Hereford today for a women's poetry celebration - and what a celebration. It was run under the auspices of the Ledbury Poetry Festival and saw an enthusiastic audience and some excellent readers. We are only too aware of the difficulty many women had in finding their voices in the past, and we were reminded of the sometimes greater difficult they had getting them heard once found. Look at the vast majority of older poetry anthologies for the evidence, where most woman writers were outnumbered at least ten to one by their male counterparts. But, whilst things may slowly be changing, so many women have still to find their voices today. Encouragement and safe spaces in which to do so remain vital but in the current financial climate many projects, including one of Ledbury Festival's own (the wonderful Women4Women group), are threatened. Given their potential to change lives, I'm convinced that they need fighting for every inch of the way.

Today's event opened with Maya Angelou's great poem "Still I rise" and then the floor was open to the young women of SHYPP, the Supported Housing for Young People Project. Their contributions, co-ordinated by their mentor Toni Cook, covered everything from the Suffragettes to what they'd say to their younger selves, from the realities of living in half way homes to dealing with estrangement from families. In July they'll be reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and their place in such an august line-up is richly deserved. SHYPP's mission is to "inspire homeless young people to dream more, learn more, do more and become more"; you can't doubt that poetry is helping these young women to do so.

Other contributions followed the SHYPP poems. One that particularly caught my attention was read by Lesley Ingrams; in addition to a very moving piece of her own, she read a poem by Meg Cox which appears in the "Me Too" anthology (Fair Acre Press) that's launched today. Inspired by the "Me Too" campaign, it has contributions from Pascale Petit, Kim Moore, Liz Lefroy and many other powerful writers wanting, as Emily Dickinson put it, to "tell the truth but tell it slant". I haven't yet managed to get a copy, though I've got one on order and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!

March 1st: St. David's Day and - officially - the first day of spring. But not one daffodil out in the garden, lambs shivering in the fields, heavy snow, strong winds and biting cold. It's also World Book Day, and it strikes me that indeed the best way to spend it is curled up with a pile of books and plenty of coffee (or something stronger later) in front of the fire.

The book I'm much enjoying at the moment is Helen Dunmore's "Inside The Wave", the final  collection of poetry she published before her death last year and the well deserved winner of the Costa prize. I've always liked her novels - "The Lie" has been a particular favourite - but I was not so familiar with her poetry. Much of it is intensely moving; the ending of her short piece "My life's stem was cut" (I know that I am dying / But why not keep flowering / As long as I can / From my cut stem?) almost reduced me to tears. It's a book well worth reading if you haven't done so.

Gladstone's Library

A couple of years ago I spent a morning at Gladstone's Library in Hawarden in Flintshire at a workshop with the poet Wendy Cope; it was such an atmospheric, inspiring environment that I promised myself a return visit to get to know it a little better. Last weekend I eventually got there - but I really need to go again, preferably for a week, to properly immerse myself in it!

The publicity material for the library describes it as "a unique institution - a residential library and meeting place dedicated to dialogue, debate and learning for open-minded individuals and groups who are looking to explore pressing questions and to pursue study and research in an age of distraction and easy solutions". The four times Victorian prime minister founded the library in 1895; on his death, public subscription paid for the amazing Grade 1 listed building that houses it and Gladstone's family later funded the addition of the residential wing which has now welcomed visitors from all over the world for the last hundred and twelve years. The library itself is free to use and there's a wide variety of courses each year covering everything from literature to theology, philosophy to languages, some running for just a day - or even an evening - others for a week. Many people use the facilities for private writing retreats too - they certainly lend themselves to that sort of activity.

I was there this last weekend for a course with the poet Judy Brown, advertised as a "playful masterclass"; it was certainly most enjoyable. Judy teaches and mentors for the Poetry School and the Poetry Society and was previously a writer-in-residence at the library. There were sixteen of us on the course and we benefited greatly from the one-to-ones on offer as well as the group sessions. Sadly, most of the other writing courses at the library later this year are already sold out - but I'm determined to get back before too long under some pretext (although "Greek in a Week" may not be quite my cup of tea!).

"Village Green Screen"

On Monday I went to the Segments poetry group in Hereford, one of the monthly sessions run by Sara Jane Arbury as part of the Ledbury Poetry Festival outreach service. It was held in the museum and art gallery, where we were working with Faye Claridge's very thought provoking "Village Green Screen" exhibition. From a Morris dancing family herself, Fay's promotional material describes it as "a place to explore the changing context for black face paint in traditional Border Morris" - something that in contemporary society raises deeply-felt issues for many people. For me a number of questions surfaced, mainly about the validity  and the value of tradition. Part of the exhibition was given over to what I can best describe as a huge spider diagram, outlining research into "blacking up" and current comments about the practice. One of the quotes in particular struck a chord - I have written on this in the past but may well be pursing it further now in the future in the light of my own changing perceptions -

Tuesday saw our monthly poetry group in Charlton Kings. A number of us have had personal issues which have affected our writing in recent weeks; once again I was very aware of the value of peer group support in the often tough world of lone endeavour. A group in which people can feel that both they and their work are understood and valued, in which they can be stimulated but not pressurised is invaluable. And it's a great pleasure to be able to celebrate each other's literary achievements - and good to be able to support and commiserate when things don't go so well (the inevitable rejections etc!). We're currently working on some more ekphrastic poems - building on work we did a couple of years ago at the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery that formed the basis of our "Poetry Amongst The Paintings" publication. Using another art form from which to create something new is an area which has interested me for a while. My enthusiasm was initially sparked by the American poet Tamar Yoseloff at a workshop at the Swindon Art Gallery, when a painting by Kyffin Williams prompted "Intrusion". Since then paintings - and to a lesser degree photographs - have been a regular source of inspiration.

Intrusion

The Dark Lake, Kyffin Williams

A winter morning numb with cold; 

we are interlopers in this barren land,

hushed by the echoes

of quarrymen's rough-shod feet

striking out on sunless paths 

of splintered slate.

Their absence haunts each cwm, each crag -

taunts our timorous footsteps 

as we trespass in their slag.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2013, first published in "Separate Ways" Blue Gates Poets 2013)