The FWC blog hop edition!

Frome Writers Collective is one of those collaborative initiatives Frome seems to do so well, with regular meetings at Three Swans and a lively core group organising trips and other events for the writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers who have all joined. I'm privileged to be an honorary member, and very happy to support their Blog Hop (thanks Piotr for nominating me). So this posting will use as focus the five interview questions:

1. My genre? I've published both short stories and novels in the past, but now I'm focusing particularly on stage drama, with two long plays and several shorts produced. Currently my work-in-progress is for a Nevertheless Productions Frome Festival 2015 performance  ~  in the Dissenters Cemetery! Here's Rosie Finnegan, company founder & director of this piece, at our last production meeting.  Midsummer Dusk will be performed at twilight by three superb actors, and we think it will be fabulous.

I'm also connected with the poetry scene as organiser of the bi-monthly Poetry Cafe at the Garden Cafe in Stony Street ~ I've had some poems published (2 in Mslexia) and still perform randomly after a brief career as a performance poet (with a few slam wins) but have taken a step back to an organisational role now, as Frome positively brims with brilliant poets like Helen Moore, Rose Flint, Rosie Jackson, and more.
And I run the monthly Words at the Black Swan workshop, an open group meeting on the first Sunday of each month 3-4.30 in the gallery to respond to the current art exhibition. Next one April 5th, responding to the Young Open, which has some stunning images.
And linking poetry with drama, brilliant stand-up poet Rob Gee agreed to bring his award-winning one-man show FRUITCAKE to Frome's Merlin on March 27th. Not to be missed!
So in short, my writing life is a mix of doing it and working with other people who're doing it. Perfect.

2  Current projects?  As well as the play for Nevertheless Productions, I'm co-scripting a piece which will be performed by Annabelle Macfadyen, initially in the garden of the American Museum in Bath and later in Frome. Time Walk is basically the story of the whole of life in the last 4.6 billion years... massive research required but all fascinating. We performed a version in the festival last year and are now busily updating with recent cosmic research.
I also review for Plays International, which involves enjoying great productions at Theatre Royal Bath, Bristol Old Vic, Tobacco Factory, Salisbury Playhouse ~ and of course at our own Merlin Theatre. My first responses are posted in my blog, then the best are combined for my column. And I count this blog itself as a writing project too ~ my aim is to show all the amazing creative stuff that goes on in Frome!
3 Jack London once said "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." Which may be true, as long as you don't stun it senseless, but in my experience of working with writers on creative courses for nearly 20 years, the problem is more likely to be self-doubt than lack of enthusiasm. Most writers have a severe self-critic, ready to whisper negatively whether they do write ('that's terrible prose!) or don't ("see, you've run out of ideas already!")  Negotiating with that inner voice is key: persuade it to let you originate freely, and then invite it back later to edit. Fay Weldon explains more in her essay Harnessed to the Harpy in the Penguin collection The Agony and the Ego (recommended for fiction writers, orderable from Hunting Raven Books)

4 When bored with staring at a blank page...  actually I can't help there, as writing to me has since childhood been as enticing as Black Magic to a chocoholic. I'd suggest going for a walk ~ but take a notebook. And of course, a creative writing course (like the ones on Skyros or in Andalucia) never fails to inspire...
5  My personal favourite place to work is anywhere I can take my laptop ~ cafes in Frome like the River House, Divas, the Garden Cafe. At home I've got a study which has sunset views. And I always, always, always carry a notebook.

So, on to the next FWC member to share their modus operandi.  Do take a look at the web page of Alison Clink, founder of the Frome Festival short story contest, prolific & much published short story writer, and now memoirist, whose book The Man Who Didn't Go To Newcastle is about to be launched. This immensely moving tribute to her brother combines pathos with humour and gives insight, as her publisher promises, "into what happens when ordinary lives are faced with the extraordinary."

Footnote to this somewhat patchwork posting: Bristol theatre company Show of Strength teamed up with Wells Festival of Literature on Saturday to offer twelve short plays in 15 shops throughout the day in their 'Trading Local' free theatre event.  FWC member Tim O'Connor was one of the writers, with a very funny monologue located in a flower shop.  I didn't get to see all the plays as I'd spent the morning at Frome's Welshmill Pump Track marvelling at the skill & speed of the bikers (youngest just 5 years old! and the older lads went round like rockets) but the plays I saw were all excellent. Here's David Reakes as Prince Steve, looking for a dance outfit in the sale rail... gentle humour with a powerful & moving subtext. And ~ because it's all theatre too ~ here's a glimpse of the bikers


and some of last week's musical gems: Back Before Breakfast at the Grain bar, and the community choir at Wesley Chapel. Frome really does have it all!

Frome Festival day 2... time travel and feasting

A day of art and music in the streets of Frome: The Open Studios trail comprises 62 local artists in twenty venues around the town offering free viewing this & next weekend. I made a start with Sam West's paintings~ so well integrated with her house that this one lives above the cooker ~ the Bennett Centre, and the Old Wool Arts Store where I found driftwood angels and sea-glass jewellery.

Meanwhile authors were gathering for a signing at Hunting Raven bookshop and musicians queuing to perform at the Archangel throughout the day. Here's Bugs, aka Julian Hight, who featured in both line-ups.

Then on to Millenium Green, the start point of Time Walk ~ the story of the earth in a thousand paces, the project Annabelle Macfadyen and I have been working on for months... if not longer. From the supernova explosion that started our solar system to the present moment, "with all our evolutionary history inside us, essentially part of this Earth, made of stardust, and bacteria, and shaped by the fish and reptiles and the early mammals we once were, within the web of life, from the beginning of time." I  seriously did more research for this project than for my degree, but it was terrific fun and our group of walkers was gratifyingly appreciative. Phew. What's next.

Well, the Food Feast, of course (African Kitchen my pick) with the marvellous Street Bandits leading a parade into the market yard where free music plays all night once the mayor, wearing a bio-degradeable chain, has completed the official Festival opening, which took all of two minutes, then hundreds of us watched the Milk Street Band,  then Daisy Chapman & Sue Law, then The Pigeons... ~ that's one of them below ~ and by now evening sunshine is ceding to dusk and I have been dancing with the Lady Mayoress for some time so we all decide to move on up to the tapas bar for a nightcap... and so ends day two.

We all realise the earth roll’d round in its diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, as Wordsworth pantheisticly put it, for a very long time before Homo Sapiens came along to blow up the rocks and cut down the trees, but Did You Know that if you decided to walk the history of this planet at a rate of 2 steps = one million years, you’d have to walk all day, and only after lunch would man’s ancestors emerge, jellyfishlike, and only in the last 2 centimetres would agriculture register anywhere in the world, followed within millimetres by war, industry, and religion? Nor me. Greg Morter has worked out a scale timeline from the Big Bang till now, and his Cosmic Walk is mind-blowing. You take hydrogen gas and you leave it alone and it turns into rose-bushes, giraffes, and humans, is how cosmologist Brian Swimme sums up the inconceivable surprisingness of our history - and it gets weirder than that.

The full journey takes two days, as the longest part of the story is lifeless chaos until on the morning of the second day, a mere 5 billion years ago, our mother-star Tiamat goes supernova and from the blazing dust of that catastrophe our solar system begins to form. We are indeed stardust, as Joni Mitchell sang, and as Greg beautifully puts it: we are a stardust cloud that has become conscious of itself and its own history – dust talking to itself, about itself.

Greg’s talks are full of fascinating facts and thought-provoking soundbites, though I admit round about Matter is not matter in the opening presentation I did start feeling like Dougal in Father Ted when Ted explains perspective by use of a small plastic cow. “This one close, that one far away. Now do you get it, Dougal?” “No, Ted.” But slowly, walking our time-line in kilometres which each represent a billion years – 13.7 of them – we all begin to grasp the full extraordinariness, if not the meaning, of life. It’s surprisingly late in the story before death enters ~ along with sex. As bacteria, we had no life cycle and basked in sunshine without predators or prey: only when plants evolved with chloroplast, enabling them to make their own food, did rudimentary animal life start to develop mouths in order to eat each other. So you could say that because 2 billion years ago we lacked one tiny element in our cell structure, we grew into a species programmed to attack and destroy…

Greg says no such thing, of course. He reminds us that “We are the species that reflects back to the universe its own majesty.” And it’s not all about the science: there are celebratory rituals and reflections, cosmic role-play (pictured is Annabelle as the earth being bombarded by comets) and lots of superb food on offer at the camp site. The weather was 90% excellent, so we could laze on our breaks in million-year old sunshine (a million years and 8 minutes, actually – rays take 8 minutes to travel to earth) and appreciate a celebratory rainbow at the end of the day,
At the end of the weekend as we ponder on this astonishing world which has somehow survived blazing infernos and ice ages and at least five extinctions, the two themes which emerge most powerfully are creativity and continuity. The world we recognise now won't survive, clearly, but something will happen and on past history "it will probably be beyond our wildest dreams.” So it’s up to us, really. But we all know that anyway.
I’ll end this posting as we ended the evening around the camp fire, with the Galaxy Song.