Archive by Author

Naked Violence Travels – Valley Press Poets

30 Sep
Valley Press Poets Jonathan Davidson, Kelley Swain, Melane Engelund Photo (c) Jennifer Berry
Host Sam with Dog Photo (c) Jennifer Berry
Kelley Swain the Naked Muse Photo (c) Jennifer Berry

Last night, the Valley Press Poets shrugged off poetry’s sometime image of daffodils and pretty birds and found the fun in Gothic horror and time-travelling violence.

Kelley Swain from Rhode Island USA, for instance, is very well travelled in the nude.
I’m not being rude.

She’s a life model, immortalised on many walls in paint, pencil and charcoal (or forgotten in a dusty attic or moldering shed). How many versions of her are there? Up it sticks a couple of graphite fingers to selfies, anyhow. Continue reading →

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From Spain to Swindon via Stockholm and Saskatchewan: protest and love are the themes of Festival Finale

19 May
Cristina Newton
Zander Sharp
La Heidi Bèlika
Emma Hooper
Kit Hawes

At around the same time that a protest song by the Ukrainian singer Jamala was winning the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm on Saturday night, the Spanish duo La Heidi Bèlika were performing their own protest song on the stage of Swindon Town Hall. Continue reading →

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Wild writing

18 May
Isn't Lower Shaw Farm pretty?

Isn’t Lower Shaw Farm pretty? Photo (C) Festival Chronicle.

Us chroniclers love an event leader who gives good quote.

Bridget Holding’s workshop was one of well-honed analogies, thoughtful phrases and stimulating prompts.

Her writing hook is wild. “Nature is a brilliant resource – it’s very living, it helps writing to become alive. It grounds ourselves,” said Bridget. And ‘new’ nature writing is very now – such as Amy Liptrot and The Outrun, as featured earlier in the Swindon Festival of Literature.

She explained what she meant: ‘writing is like tracking a wild animal’. An animal exists in its environment; it uses its senses. It has a physical bodily reaction with broad body sensations which intensify into emotions. Emotion is there to deal with a threat, leading to action. This will create powerful writing, lighting up the brain’s neurons, helping the reader live in your world, not simply look at it. Continue reading →

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Character and values with Cristina Odone

18 May
Cristina Odone Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Cristina Odone Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com

“I hate many American things, but I admire their confidence. America has something we don’t. They know their values. But they also know how to assimilate,” said Cristina Odone at Swindon Festival of Literature.

Cristina is a professional thinker (director of the new Centre for Character and Values at the Legatum Institute, former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman) who’s fed up with us British being all wishy-washy and apologetic about our values.

“I’m not saying we have to judge. I’m not saying Western values are the best; we are shaped by Judaeo-Christian values. But they are ours and we should stand by them.”

The values in question are Aristotelian in origin, Christianised by saints Aquinas and Augustine: courage, obedience, charity and scholarship. (It is interesting that Cristina chooses to interpret ‘agape’ as ‘charity’ over ‘love’, and misses out ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ completely from the Christian triplet.)

The talk begins with a tale of two men, two Muslims, both British. Asad Shah, a community-minded Scottish-Pakistani shopkeeper, was murdered ostensibly in extremist retaliation for Easter goodwill messages on social media. The other was Mohammed Emwazi or ‘Jihadi John’, the British-Arab ISIS terrorist. Cristina believes Shah was in possession of good character and strong values, while Emwazi was rootless and felt no connection to his community. Continue reading →

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Detective novelist returns to the scene of the crime

16 May
©Calyx Picture Agency Swindon Festival of literature Alison Bruce
©Calyx Picture Agency Swindon Festival of literature Alison Bruce
©Calyx Alison Lansdown with car

It all for started in Swindon’s Town Hall for Alison Bruce – then Lansdown – at a film-writing course.

“I like the idea, but you need to write a book first,” was the tutor’s instructions.

So Alison went away and wrote her third book; well, her first, but it was like Star Wars where the first turned into the third in the seven book series.

I knew Alison in the 1980s when she was a presenter on local radio, presenting a rock and roll show.

I have photographed her with her Ford Zodiac car as a mechanic, as a model, and recently I ventured into her now home town of Cambridge, to interview her about the first book in the Detective Goodhew series of crime novels. Continue reading →

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Swindon’s greatest intellects clash at Think Slam

15 May
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured Louisa Daveson 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured John Little 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured Kevin Lister 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured David Burridge 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured Chris Eddy (Winner) 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Literature – Think Slam Pictured John Sheehy 13/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com

Swindon’s greatest intellects clashed on Friday night, at the seventh annual Think Slam.

(Full disclosure: Chronicler Louisa was one of the competitors, and I am contractually obliged to describe her as one of Swindon’s greatest intellects.)

Over three gruelling rounds, seven competitors did mental battle in the Swindon Festival of Literature competition run in association with the Swindon Philosophical Society.

Swindon, by the way, is unique in having this kind of philosophical thrown-down. Until another town or city picks up the gauntlet, the competition winner is, by default, the UK’s – and possibly the planet’s – greatest living philosopher (just think the USA and the baseball World Series). Continue reading →

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Profanity and insanity – Swindon is Blessed by Brian

12 May
brian blessed_3394Swindon Festival of literatureBrian Blessed

©Calyx Picture Agency Brian Blessed

*** Warning: this report contains swearing, obviously: it’s about Brian Blessed. ***

Brian Blessed is going into Space. This is a good thing, as it is probably the only place large enough to accommodate his personality. Certainly the stage of Swindon Arts Centre cannot not hold him.

If Brian Blessed were an astrophysical phenomenon, I think he would be a supermassive black hole, because strange things happen in his field of gravity. And he’s massive. Continue reading →

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Change Everything

12 May
Swindon Festival of Litrature Pictured Christian Felber 11/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Swindon Festival of Litrature Pictured Christian Felber 11/05/16 Pictures Clare Green/www.claregreenphotography.com
Citizen panel preparing to vote

Swindon Festival of Literature director Matt Holland gave a fist pump as last night’s author concluded at Swindon Arts Centre.

A full house, a double event (for the first time), attended by Swindon’s ‘movers and shakers’, cheering. Was this a celebrity? A high-profile fiction writer? Not this time. This was an author talking about the economy.

A festival fan had suggested the event and the festival took a risk that paid off.

The speaker, Christian Felber ‘flown in from Austria by way of Portugal’, is not an economist, he tells us. In fact he’s rather cross with modern economics (as cross as such a kind, smiley man such as Christian could be). Modern economics – and there is no other kind, it’s a very new discipline – is heartless.  He tells a joke – a student worries to a university professor that he cannot decide the course to study. The professor says to follow his heart. The student thinks then says, ‘business ethics’. The lecturer says, ‘then you will have to make a choice’. Economics only cares about itself and how much money is made – ethics is seen to have no relevance to it. It mixes up means and goals and forgets money is a means to an end, not the end. Continue reading →

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Beautiful and useful – The Saffron Tales

11 May

unspecifiedIn the 1930s, a country made a PR faux pas – it asked the rest of the world to call it Iran, the name used by its people, and not what the Western World named it, Persia.

In English, Persia is the sound of exotic mystery, the Arabian nights. It sounds luxurious. Perrrsia, the noise a cat makes when it’s happy; Iran sounds like someone fleeing. The relationship the West – and certainly Britain – currently has with the country is undoubtedly problematic and unhelpful as to our associations with the newish name, especially after the revolution of 1978 and the rise of Islamic militancy. And the capital city of Tehran is not one that evokes history or millennia of culture, as this afternoon’s author Yasmin herself describes it, ‘one of those Middle Eastern cities thrown up without thought or design.’

So former Middle Eastern human rights campaigner, now cooker writer, Yasmin Khan, wanted to reclaim the Persian magic of her mother’s homeland. It happened by accident; in 2012, when the Western-imposed sanctions on Iran hit hard, her grandfather died and she went to stay with her grandmother in the lush lands of the Caspian Sea where she spent some of her childhood and holidays, away from her home in Birmingham. For something to do she asked to be shown some recipes, and while she cooked she heard the family memories that went with them. Continue reading →

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Red Ken is among friends at Swindon Festival of Literature

10 May
DSC_2783 Ken Livinsgtone at Swindon festival of Literature

©Calyx Ken Livingstone at the Swindon Festival of Literature

“The reason I keep getting into trouble is that I’m always saying what I believe.”

At the height of KenGate (are we calling it KenGate?) I saw a funny tweet, retweeted by Swindon Festival of Literature author and comedian Dom Joly. It imagines Ken Livingstone on Mastermind:

“Your name?”
“Ken Livingstone.”
“Your specialist subject?”
“Not bringing up Hitler.”
“Your time starts n––“
“Hitler.”

There was a time (last week) when it seemed that Ken couldn’t stop talking about Hitler. So how long would it be before he brought up Adolf again? Within the first minute? Not at all? Read on to find out! Continue reading →

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