It's official: May Madness at Frome Poetry Cafe was "the nipples" - and thankyou Alison for sharing this term of high approbation in a hilarious tale of teen times.
Dianne Penny and Jo Butts delighted the appreciative audience with musings on both May and madness as well as love and life generally, with sixteen other poets & writers contributing to the open mic. Impressively, several pieces had been written especially for this event. Many, like Bristol slammer David Johnson and local bard Phyllis Higgins, made us laugh; others were touching, intriguing, entertaining, lyrical... yeah, it was a great night. The nipples.

Jill (Happy as a Dead Cat) Miller and I went to the inaugural 'Writers' Lounge' at Bristol Old Vic on Thursday. Writers' Room Co-ordinator Sharon Clark had the great idea that as writers tend to feel isolated we should get together for "drinking, talking, and listening to music". Great fun, and good to meet up with writerly friends: screenwriter David Lassman, Bath bard Kevan Manwaring, and poet/novelist Rosemary Dun.

Poet James Nash has a new interactive site on Facebook, a kind of poetry party-bag, with songs, snippets and pictures - he's inviting Spring poems which he'll discuss onsite, and you can download his monthly podcast from here too. If you're not a Facebook fan, you can listen to it here. I have a special interest in the May edition as I'm James's interviewee. We did it via Skype while I was in California, and just listening to it takes me back...

And finally... It's out! The 2009 Frome Festival brochure. Months of meetings interspersed with emails, enquiries, corrections, confusion, celebration, and the usual stuff involved in putting on 25 events in one week, ensuring there's something loosely under the banner of 'Literary' for every taste and age-group, including contests, talks, walks, agent-interviews, poetry performances, and workshops, with every genre covered from picturebook to screenwriting... you get the idea. So get the brochure, and start booking! You won't find Hat Box poets declaiming in the streets or internationally-acclaimed Arabic writers reading over supper in any other Lit. Fest. this year!