Tag Archives: literature

Town with a city heart – Swindon Festival of Literature launch

22 Mar

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The Swindon Festival of Literature has a thing for bracing days, ya know – freezing brass monkeys. It kicks off at a cold dawn in May and Thursday, a biting March day you may have noticed, was the launch, outside in a windy Swindon Central Library atrium.

The Festival likes to stimulate ‘thinking parts’ so maybe all this chilly fresh air enables our brain to fully engage and not lie indolent in the sloth-like embrace of central heating.

So, back inside the warm library, I munched on the lovely homemade launch food and thought how good it is when politicians speak from the heart rather than generic politic speak. Matt Holland, Festival director, seemed to appreciate this too because he expressed his love for guest speaker, Teresa Page, the mayor of Swindon: for her, Swindon is the town with the heart of a city; she only had one book a year at Christmas (a present from her sister); and (a girl after my own heart) she also enjoyed comics Bunty and Judy. No tired ‘cultural desert’ metaphors for the Lady Mayor. Continue reading →

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Porritt sends a strangely familiar stand-in – Jonathon Porritt at Swindon Festival of Literature

15 May
Jonathon Porritt...or is it Alex McKay? ©Calyx Pictures

Jonathon Porritt…or is it Alex McKay? ©Calyx Pictures

So, Jonathon Porritt couldn’t make today’s event. In his stead was Alex McKay from 2050.

Alex looked a lot like Jonathon and sounded a lot like Jonathon and we were all giggling at the shared joke.

Festival Director Matt Holland confided afterwards that Jonathon arrived at Swindon Arts Centre with minutes to spare having arrived that day from some far flung place. Festival attenders arrived at the venue and saw an anxious director fretting at the lack of an author so Matt and Jonathon decided to cook up a little performance to defuse the anxiety. Continue reading →

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War correspondent recalls the achievements of the Great War women – Kate Adie at Swindon Festival of Literature

13 May

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Ask anyone to name a woman associated with the battlefield and you’ll get one of three answers – Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, or former BBC chief news correspondent Kate Adie – a veteran of Tiananmen Square, the first Gulf War, and the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Apt, then, that Kate has written a book about the women of the first world war. It’s called Fighting on the Home Front, but if the title suggests that women never made it across the Channel, let alone to the front line, then that’s far from the truth – as the author will explain later. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Literature Launch 2014

21 Mar

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The Death Cafe. “Everyone welcome but not recommended for anyone recently bereaved.” I’m wondering if I should go to this on Monday 12 May as my cat died a few weeks ago.

She was twenty years old and this was, I’m told, a ‘good innings’. But she was part of our family for nearly half my life so our cat-lessness is making us sad.

But what’s this got to do with the launch of the twenty-first Swindon Festival of Literature, yesterday, noon, at Swindon Central Library?

Funny you should ponder. Sandwiched between Nathan Filer (The Shock of the Fall) and Kate Adie (Needs No Introduction), is the Death Cafe, a discussion about death and dying. You may partake of rich tea but perhaps not sympathy. Bring not your raw nerves; bring instead your pragmatism. Continue reading →

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We live in a story shaped world – CS Lewis

13 May
C.S.Lewis - a life by Alister McGrath

C.S.Lewis – a life by Alister McGrath

A week of the Swindon Festival of Literature has gone by and it’s at about this time that frazzled Festival types starting running out of sleep and clothes to wear, today the search for a clean T-shirt brought a lengthy, fruitless search in the bedroom, it wasn’t there of course, maybe my tired brain was lying about which wardrobe. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – Being Human

11 Oct

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Having the same title as one of my favourite TV shows was a big point in favour of Tuesday night’s Swindon Festival of Poetry Finale.

Okay so Being Human didn’t have werewolves, ghosts and vampires in it, but both are about the stuff of life – life stages, its ordinariness, the rubbish things that can happen, the amazing things and how we each deal with all of it.

Taken from the Bloodaxe Books anthology of the same name, Being Human is a dramatisation of thirty-four poems from different writers performed by three fantastic actors, Benedict Hastings, Elinore Middleton and Barrett Robertson. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – Is it Nearly Christmas?

11 Oct
Collectively writing

Collectively writing

Is it nearly Christmas? I wrote a seasonally related poem at Matt Holland’s ‘Poetry and Life’ workshop on Tuesday, the final day of the Swindon Festival of Poetry.

I can’t take all the blame/credit. It was a joint effort. After reading and discussing other poetic works and how they tackle life – and how ‘language can free you and bind you’ – and how poetry differs to prose (‘Poetry can mean something different to what it says,’ said poet Robert Frost and ‘prose is obliged to mean what it says’ said Matt) we collectively tried our own work. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – poetry darrlin’ Pam Ayres

6 Oct

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It’s fair to say that last night Swindon Festival of Poetry hosted one of Britain’s most popular poets, at The Platform, Swindon.

As well as enjoying some of Pam Ayres’s poetry, we heard anecdotes about her life and the inspiration behind some of the audience’s favourite poems, documented in her 2011 autobiography ‘The Necessary Aptitude: a Memoir’.

Pam never had aspirations to write ‘deep’ poetry – ‘other people could do it so much better’. But it’s to poetry’s benefit that she developed her own style and wrote in a way that anyone could relate to and enjoy. Continue reading →

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Swindon Festival of Poetry – psychogeography and sestinas

6 Oct

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Caught the aftermath of Michael Scott’s psychogeographical stroll around Swindon yesterday morning, in Swindon’s Central Library Poetry Space.

Psychogeography aims to make the everyday more interesting or to absorb and appreciate above and beyond the usual tourist attractions one would look for in an urban environment. Just the thing for Swindon, then.

Comments about the session included: “In context signs are really boring, but out of context they’re silly” and “I liked the skip” also “The Wyvern Theatre has stalactites.” Continue reading →

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Artwords Open Mic – You’re Meat, Book

5 Oct

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Yesterday evenings lively and well-attended Artwords Poetry Open Mic festival special opened with a story from festival organiser Hilda.

Donned in her Mabel Watson persona accompanied by Barry ‘the teeth’ Dicks she megaphoned poetry at Sascos’ Cafe in Swindon’s Brunel Shopping Centre that afternoon. Apparently this was too subversive for the security guards who refused to allow them out into the precinct: ‘No poetry outside the cafe. No permission for poets in the Brunel Centre.’ Or something. So, poetry okay with tea and cake, but not other retail therapy.

First poet Bethany Pope (who will be instructing me in the way of the Sestina poetry form later today) was inspired by a death of a rat for her piece. (This is the second rat death poem today. I must write my own.) She was accompanied by the rhythmic thunder of dancers’ feet from Swindon Dance above the Central Library’s poetry space. Continue reading →

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