Archive | Swindon RSS feed for this section

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 →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Alone unwatched?

30 Sep

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Those China eyes are staring at you again, well one of them is, the other gazes sideways at someone on the other side of the room, an admirable bit of ocular multi-tasking for an inanimate object.

A China paw gloved by a China shoe pokes from the folds of a China robe as if this Swindon Sphinx has once more lost the straightforward pathway.

But this is not a straightforward place, nor is it a dark wood, it is Poetry Swindon Festival being five years old.

You had an unusually hectic Wednesday night, you left your phone charger on the train, you feel washed out and tired, your mood dial is flicking its eyelash in and out of grumpy.

Like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn, a great friend appears at your side, you met her through poetry, and she has held you up when the mood dial mires in the red.

She offers you the clothes of a poet and you put them on, you don’t want to be a Spaceman or a Medieval Knight today, you want to be a poet.

You wonder where these clothes will take you? Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Spoke and word

18 May

6bbebce6-88e7-469f-9457-e72b9c766721

Part of the attentive Poetry Swindon audience at The Sun Inn, Coate.

 

Swindon Literary Festival this is not, this is Swindon Festival of Literature.

As Matt Holland made clear in the inaugural Kaye Franklin Memorial Lecture, Literary Festivals are all about books; a Literature Festival is about writing, good writing.

Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , ,

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 →

Tags: , , , , , ,

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 →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Image

Creativity in and out of the 70’s at Hilda’s Lounge

18 May
Hilda Sheehan with Robert Vas Dias (C) Jennifer Berry
Caroline Day talks to Sam (C) Jennifer Berry

Hilda’s Lounge took place at the Richard Jefferies Museum as part of Swindon Festival of Literature, 13 May 2016. Guests Robert Vas Dias, Sophie Duffy, Caroline Day and Barry Andrews were each in conversation for an hour.

First, confession: I was not around for the ’70s (or, for that matter, a large amount of the ’80s). I am therefore reliant on Hilda Sheehan’s ’70s lounge (located deep in the Richard Jefferies Museum) conforming to stereotypes found in BBC ’70s shows and themed nightclubs.

The result is one that I can believe: the wallpaper seems to be have been lifted straight from Abigail’s Party; a grand-looking record player, lava lamp and copious amounts of Babycham contributing to an atmosphere one can one only describe as ‘locked in time’. I’m told that Babycham is a typical part of this environment: after watching a few people enjoying it a little too much, I can see arguments for and against it.

Having been allowed time to take in this fragment of the past, we are thrown into our first guest talent. One might assume that Hilda’s guests would be there to similarly impart memories of the ’70s. This would not necessarily be the case. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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 →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 →

Tags: , , , , , , ,

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 →

Tags: , , , , ,

Is there life in the old dog yet?

10 May
D J Taylor

D J Taylor (left) with Matt Holland ©Calyx Picture Agency

10th May 2016

DJ Taylor – on the life of Literature in Britain – The Prose Factory

 The purpose of this chronicle is not to offer up a review of D J Taylor’s latest tome The Prose Factory – a 200,000-word examination of the life of literature in England. Bigger and better folk than I have already opined on its success, or otherwise, of achieving its objectives. But, as Taylor’s entertaining and humour-injected talk today was centred around it, we should look at it.

Looking at The Guardian’s review from earlier this year, I was drawn to their comment that “Taylor is firmly on the side of ‘ordinary readers, always on the look out for ‘snootiness’.” I like that because I consider myself to be an ‘ordinary reader’. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →