Words and music - and more cake than usual

As this week's bulletin is mostly on a writerly theme, let's start with a blast of music: Saturday evening saw the much-anticipated return of Frome's hugely popular quartet, The Raggedy Men, playing at The Sun to an enthusiastic audience. The songs are all punk classics, but the skill and polish of the presentation isn't '70s-rough: these are all seriously good musicians and terrific  entertainers. The Guns of Brixton is still my favourite, but Andy, Bugsy, Pat & Carl make every song special.   

Now buckle up for a lot about writing. It's been five years since Frome Writers' Collective launched 'Silver Crow', a quality-control system to support self-publishing authors, so Friday night saw a birthday party at the Masonic Hall, with all FWC members invited.  This was a chance for authors to mingle, with a complementary drink, and show off their books, perhaps selling copies too. The sitting-down part began with a few words of encouragement from Mayor Andy, before Alison Clink, well-known in Frome for leading writing groups & classes in Frome, spoke of their benefits for writers.   

There are currently 18 books boasting the Silver Crow logo, and Nikki Coppleston, who launched her 'Jeff Lincoln' detective series in 2016 this way, talked about her experiences and her new novel The Promise of Salvation. Gill Harry shared the story and images of her engaging new book for children with an interest in history: Zoe and the Ancient Egypt Adventure - superbly self-illustrated. Here's Alison, soon to be published by John Chandler of Hobnob Press (on R) who has added several  Frome writers to his list, including poet David Thompson (on L). There are more pictures of this event on the FWC facebook website.

Writing continued the theme of my week on Saturday: Following my talk on writing short stories at the Library to a small but delightfully enthusiastic group, I headed for the upper rooms of the Black Swan, where The Write Place was hosting a tea-party, partly for self-promotion and partly for fun and mince pies with mulled wine. This popular project was the inspiration of Frome writer Kate McEwan, and has a big following now among writers who like to write in a quiet place but with a sense of surrounding support - sounds like the perfect combo. There are monthly one-day writing retreats which include a starter-session, too. The 'Chat Room' was full and very friendly - here's Kate (on the right) at the end of the event. Kate started her literary success in 1983 with an illustrated history of the south-west suburbs of London, and she reminisces entertainingly about initial struggles,  until Ealing Walkabout sold out its first print-run of 3500 and rushed to reprint 5000 more.

Proof Pudding Club night at River House nicely rounded off this wordy week: this group's role, devised by Tina the ever-inventive custodian of Hunting Raven Books, involves appraising the promotional proof copies of new titles, and eating cake. In the final roundup, Ai Weiwei's tale of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows emerged as an absolute must-read - this isn't surprising: I still have disturbing memories of his exhibition in London six years ago filled with courageous criticisms of the Chinese government, highlighting their callous treatment of their people. The odd, jelly-baby, look of the book jacket almost, but not quite, evokes the collections of little faces released by campaigners attempting to stop human traffic of hundreds of thousands of children in China...  One to read, if you can.   

And while we're still on the subject of books...this was the week that should have seen a high profile party launch for Struck Off at the Silk Mill - another Hobnob title -but, sadly though wisely, author-host John Killah decided to cancel rather than cause Frome the anxiety of a large group gathering from other areas. His novel now has its own private window-party in Hunting Raven, ready to delight fiction readers who may wonder what goes on in the world of a successful trial lawyers... think insider knowledge plus satirical humour, this tale may do for the legal world what David Lodge did for academic life in the '80s.

So this week's verbosity ends with an apology to Walking Festival, and the '6x6' Art exhibition at the Silk Mill, both of which sadly were squeezed off my to-do list, and with a picture of dawn over the Cooperage estate.

 

Bumper bundle week - words, words, words. And some icicles.

Murder at the Circus on zoom is the concept of Sharp Teeth with Bristol's Wardrobe Theatre: a ‘Sherlock Holmes’-style intrigue with interaction developed to the point where audience contribution becomes the major part of the show. We were divided into zoom gallery groups to solve the crime, interviewing the five 'suspects', so the dialogue of the performance became primarily our own sleuthing debate. Part murder-mystery spoof, part parlour game, constructed with extreme technical ingenuity and a clever team of actors, there was enough essential theatricality in the production to tick all the boxes of dramatic entertainment. Here's one of the audience screens at the end of the show, with our murderously deceitful but entertainingly delightful cast along the top row.

This week the focus is mostly on words. Alison Clink, founder of the Frome Festival Short Story contest, joined Frome FM's regular weekly Writers on Radio to give sound advice for competition entrants, now online here, and the Frome Writers Collective monthly meeting devoted Thursday evening to the topic of diaries. This was a very successful session, well-organised and cram full of fascinating material, from historian David Lassman's on Pepys as a somewhat unreliable witness to the Great Fire of London in 1666 ("I thought it far enough off, so I went back to sleep") to the 2020 lockdown diary of John Payne, whose latest title A West Country Homecoming has earned review praise as 'a fascinating mix of local and national history.' 

Among other intriguing insights we heard about Peter Clark's life in Damascus, Sian Williams during the 1980s Greenwatch, and Jonny Griffiths at an East End school; Michael Riggs shared the pages of his illustrated diary, Nikki Copleston revealed how hers triggers ideas for fiction and Ann Phillips' journal, begun in 1972, was beautifully laced with Yeats poetry.  My pitch was recommending blogging for writers of every genre: to encourage a regular writing habit, provide practice in editing (free from the constraints of word-count) and even lead to wider publication - my chronicle of the life & times of Frome led to a commission and Frome Unzipped was born!  As examples of personal style, try Sally Gander's The Unwritable - her current post on apophenia is fascinating - and Maria Popover's award-winning Brainpickings.  

And still in Frome, our superhero bookshop manager Tina Waller is on Nub News talking about Hunting Raven Books - she does have a face, actually, but seems to like my snap of her taken in passing during her prep for the pre-Christmas rush. 

Two poetry events on zoom this week: Frome's fabulous Liv Torc joined Wolverhampton wonder Steve Pottinger for their Literary Festival Fringe on Saturday, sharing her personal story of the last year as well as talking about the sensational success of her HAIFLU project. Liv is always not only sparklingly glamorous, but also superbly well-prepped, and her twin themes of distress and success were movingly conveyed in screen shots illustrating her talk. 

Liv's succinct summary of her experience of 'some big things' last year included bereavement and serious illness as well as banana poems and inventing the project that National Poetry Day described as 'a spectacular collective act of poetry, photography, music and film involving more than 8,000 crowd-sourced haiku, more than 500 'citizen artists', 13 films and a newly-minted artform uniquely adapted to the nation's creative needs during pandemic: it's been featured on BBC 4's Today programme, in The Times, and continues to inspire hundreds of people to write poems.' 

She is still working on the project: you can submit words or images on her facebook page here. Two of the weekly chronicles of submitted moments were shown: I picked this moment because the image is mine but it's the collation, not the individual frame, that makes this such a stunningly successful art form. 

A few hours later there was another poetic triumph to celebrate as  Caleb Parkin, current Bristol City Poet, held a launch party to celebrate the publication by Tall Lighthouse of his new collection Wasted Rainbow. It's some years since Caleb & I performed an impro collaboration-poem about lipstick in Bath, and I wish the film of the outcome had survived but, like lipstick, these things roll out of one's life. It was great to hear Caleb's sensitive, sometimes surreal, words - there's a lovely example here - and his reading was supported by invited open mic-ers and guest poets, all strong voices: I particularly enjoyed Keith Jarrett & ordered his collection from Burning Eye (which I hope includes the poem concluding we have learned to build bridges, we have learned to cross those bridges even as they burn, we have learned to love...)

With temperatures lingering round 0°(and a 'feels like' dipping as low as -11° according to my app) after the weeks of rain, this week's local landscape view shows Nunney's Donkey Lane (much of which came home on my boots). 

The sunshine flickerings on our subzero town bring stirrings of hopefulness. I didn't write another novel during this lockdown but words haven't entirely shrivelled like my amaryllis bud: a new short story was taken by an anthology, another earned a prize in the FWC winter competition (shared 3rd actually, but a certificate & book token to show for it 😊) and I've enjoyed few 'commended's, including a poem in the Corsham swan-theme contest and some of the mini-contests in the King Lear Awards (in which bulletins incidentally Frome's David Thompson is frequently named and quoted.) And, excitingly, I'm back in collaboration with my poet friend Hazel Stewart, reviving our Live & Lippy collaboration via zoom.. It's a long time since Howard Vause collected some of our performance pieces for a DVD but a few are still on his page: here's Weird, and our signature piece: What's It Like For You?  We don't know yet where this will take us but it's good to be working together again.

So now that I've illustrated Pascal's precept that brevity takes more time than verbosity (plus also my point above on the irrelevance of word-count to a blogger) I'll end, appropriately for the date, with a   Valentine project created by Frome's Summer Harwood to support Child Poverty Action. She's already raised over £700 for her hand-crafted valentine cards! So that's the visual art spot for this week. 

Biodynamics, birds, bubbles & boules

Silk Mill Studios provided the artistic masterpiece this week: a lunch box created by Jo Harringon, executive chef of 42 Acres, an ethical retreat near Witham Friary where the land is farmed organically and biodynamically. "It's all about healthy food for a better planet," Jo explains, "Our communities have lost their indigenous knowledge, so we're showing that if we look after the soil then what we harvest will naturally support us. This is all foraged food, wild-tended." The vegan treats in this box include leaves, petals, pollen, and roots, and it really is all delicious.

Moving on to words: Frome Writers Collective continues its presence on Frome FM, with the latest programme here. Rosie Jackson reads from her latest collection of ekphrastic poems, with other poem-inspired pieces, and Gill Harry and I both contributed a lament for this year's cancelled Frome Festival Small Publishers Fair, which starts 31 minutes in - Lisa Kenwright, the show's host, reads mine. The popular 'Writers in Residence' festival event continued by proxy this year - big tribute to the initiative and energy of the organisers and contributors - and one of the winning short stories is read by writer Sian Williams at 40 mins. The international short story contest went ahead too - the results are posted on the website here. Also on local radio, just over the border in West Wiltshire, The Poetry Place this month featured Frome's eco-poet Helen Moore (at 39.20) with Carrie Etter, Dru Marland and Wendy Klein, introduced by Dawn Gorman, organiser and host of Words and Ears poetry events in Bradford on Avon.

John McCullough isn't local, but his poetry collection Reckless Paper Birds, published by Penned in the Margins, is nominated for a Costa Award and his generous and honest post in response is worth quoting: 'Poetry is a craft and like any craft it takes thousands of hours of quiet honing. There's no way around this. Try to enjoy the journey of discovering new writers who reshape the way you see the world and each little breakthrough as you refine your editing strategies.'
Poets Prattlers and Pandemonialists experimented with a poetry night on their email address here where the contributions will remain available until July 28th.

And a re-recommendation of Brain Pickings, a beautifully presented blog which always has much to offer, which in this edition brims with tributes to trees from Robert Macfarlane, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, and DH Lawrence meditating on the message of the cypresses in Tuscany:

'As in clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the shell of life.  In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the cypresses commemorate.'

Ending now, with Birthday Blogger's Permitted Egoism, with my personal celebrations which somehow took over the week as the rules we now live by prohibit a massive one-off celebration so the last few days were a series of small delights, concluding on Sunday with a rainstorm festival and boules in Victoria park with my family - after a handover of 9 more copies of The Price Of Bread to a book group. I'm really happy with the way sales are going, and with the feedback too - there's a superb review from author & broadcaster Suzy Howlett here, & on my facebook page too.

A midsummer medley: drama poetry & art, filling the festival void.

My online theatre choice for this week was Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry, an unmitigatedly grim, horribly relevant, 2016 production from National Theatre - it's free to view till July 9th, if you can face a 'brave, illuminating and powerful work that confronts the hope and tragedy of revolution'.
Set in an African country struggling to self-liberate from its colonial past, the polemic is mingled with mystical elements. Tshembe was played by Danny Sapiani, Yaël Farber directed.

Poetry corner now: Bristol's David C Johnson joined singer-songwriter Beth Ford for Love and Life online, this theme interpreted broadly enough to include poems ranging from the identity problems of bees to railways, and David's excellent response to the dunking of Colston in Bristol harbour: 'A Quick Dip for Edward.'

Still with poetry, Steve Pottinger, who brought his performance group Poets, Prattlers and Pandemonialists to Frome in 2018 to great acclaim, hosts the online poetry event YeS, WE CaNt which on Sunday featured the marvellous, totally bonkers, Felix Bang. Check out this rant about how girls shoes really really really really suck, from the collection Brillo Kiddo, 'that has a look at all the big and important cardboard boxes in my life.' There were several stand-out poems on the open-mic, presented via you-tube and sound-cloud as well as online text - I liked Gerald Kells deceptively profound 'Chrysalis' - in this varied event.


This is the week when many in Frome would be gearing themselves up for festival week, maybe returning from Glastonbury in full summer festival mood, or fine-tuning the previous weeks of preparation... my personal events, the Poetry Cafe, Nevertheless Pub Theatre and the literary & historical walks, like the rest of the programme are on hold until 2021 but the Frome Festival organising team won't let us forget our town's crowning arts event entirely. And on Tuesday we enjoyed an online Frome Festival Quiz, hosted by genial question-master Roger Southard.

The festival's visual art element has survived, catalogued in the Virtual Art Trail, and some studios are now accessible: check this link:;Open Art Trail-Outer. And for the official opening night, Festival director and musical performer Martin Dimery joined with Cooper Hall's creative director and vibrant songstress Morag McLaren to remind us that We'll meet again... click the link for a medley of witty parodies to remind us of the local talent always a favourite feature of the festival.

And now we move offline for live art event!
As the doors of the town cautiously open again, photographer Mark Brookes has a month-long exhibition at Fromie Gifts. Mark is noted for his reportage monochromes, and an impressive set of his Extinction Rebellion imagery contrasts powerfully with several large, subtly coloured, artistic poses with added words from Frome poet  'B' - this one features a mask by Gladys Paulus.

Still with personal journeys into creativity exposed to the world: massive excitement for me this week, with the arrival of a box of books fresh from the printers: The Price of Bread, my novel set in Belfast in the last Troubles, with a cover illustration by Frome artist Mutartis Boswell  - it looks fabulous and, thrillingly, all copies from this delivery were snapped up within twelve hours.
Another box will arrive early next week, half of which are already pledged, but there are still copies at Hunting Raven Books, as wonderful manager Tina 'Best in the Southwest' Gaisford-Waller grabbed me for a socially-distanced signing session as I passed by the bookshop door.
Supportive promotion also came from Frome Writers Collective: Gill Harry took this pic when I joined her to commiserate over the cancellation of the Small Publishers Fair, always on the first Saturday of the festival, filling the Silk Mill with buyers & sellers, readers & writers, publishers, promoters & purchasers and every sort of bibliophile. Next year, eh, guys....

Dreaming of midsummer and after...

And now, for anyone missing the Midsummer Night's Dream theme thriving in early June, there's another version of the streamed-theatre's favourite play: this one from National Theatre at The Bridge, and the most exciting, innovative, and enjoyable of the three. Much of the delight in this interpretation came from the unusual way the two sets of rulers, mortal and fairy, are merged: this is the usual policy in casting, for dramatic reasons as well as convenience, since the conflicts of both royal couples echo each other, but the master-stroke in this production is the reversal of the storylines for Titania and Oberon: not only is it irresistibly funny to see the besotted fairy king sharing a bubblebath with Bottom the ass, but this 'taming' of a domineering lord by his angry lady also works better for relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta. There's witty, but not over-milked, impro among the 'mechanicals', there's trapeze swinging for the fairies, audience involvement, and the soundtrack - from Beyonce, Florence & the Machine and Dizzee Rascal to the London Symphony Orchestra - is great. Nick Hytner directing this 2019 production emphasises the 'dream' aspect of the story and makes sense of the extremes of emotion in the forest by a set with floating beds as the four lovers imagine their own passions becoming confused - it's odd, but it works.

When Luke Wright's solo poetry-play What I learned from Johnny Bevan was staged in 2016 it won awards for both writing and performance and was hailed by critics as a 'blistering story of our times.' Back then, Rosie Finnegan - the inspiration behind our co-directed pub theatre production company Nevertheless - joined me in  Soho Theatre to see this powerful personal parable of hope and political disillusion and we were both overawed by the combination of drama, poetry, and polemic. Applauded at the time for its questioning of the developing values of both the main UK parties, four years on Luke's online revival is even more pertinent, and his intimate, informal, performance on Wednesday lost none of the impact.  (And Luke still looks like he'd get questioned trying to buy alcohol... an enviable problem. )

Liv Tork's inspirational weekly posting of haiflu - haiku sent to her from round the country and beyond, to chronicle lockdown - is now compiled into a 40 minute film of still shots - all poignant, not all sombre, some breathtakingly moving. The photographs paired with them are superb and stunningly well chosen - this really is an amazing pulse-beat record of this summer.

And in other word-related news: The enterprising team at Frome Writers Collective have managed to fulfil one popular Frome Festival feature despite lockdown, by organising their annual Writers in Residence contest as an 'At Home Challenge', within the usual time constraint between receiving the title and handing in the finished piece. Prizes and zoom presentation will be on July 11th. And for those missing live readings: The Poetry Place on West Wilts Radio, hosted by Dawn Gorman with Peter O'Grady, offers recorded shows featuring guest poets - Frome's Claire Crowther is one - available on 'Play Again' here. This month's show on Sunday had an excellent quartet of guests including eco-poet Helen Moore.  If you have poems of your own you'd like to share and are mourning the cancellation of the July Poetry Cafe (postponed, like the rest of the Frome Festival programme in entirety, until 2021) then do consider posting your piece on the Frome Poetry Cafe page - not as much fun as seeing the audience's faces, but you can add an image and your words will be preserved! (but don't do this if you plan to submit for publication,obvs.)   Prose workshops from Story Friday organiser and skilled practitioner Clare Reddaway are running online throughout July - contact her for dates - and, still loosely on a theme of story-telling, if you missed the social history show Three Acres and a Cow (as sadly I did, though I have seen this excellent show live) then do dip into their resources - a salutary story still hugely relevant today.

Little to say about music... you've probably all got your favourite sites and connections, and if not just put on the tele for Glastonbury (very tactful of the weather to provide rain this weekend to console us to this loss) where, from a 2017 set by Frome's most famous fans the Foo Fighters to a documentary  on the history of the John Peel stage, you can enjoy the whole experience barring the aromas and the merch. Enjoy the slowly ebbing summer, everyone!

Summer has come and passed...

A last look back at summer now, in an immaculately trimmed Home Counties garden, a long time ago : Alan Ayckbourn's first play Relatively Speaking has been revived at Salisbury Playhouse by Wiltshire Creative in a superb in-the-round production. It’s 1965, era of Dollyrocker dresses and The Temptations, London notoriously burgeoning with a new emerging cultural energy while the Home Counties strive to maintain middle class morals and values. When Relatively Speaking opened in London two years later, the evolving scene was reaching its peak in the ‘summer of love’ and this comedy was perfectly pitched, winning rave reviews and establishing Alan Ayckbourn’s reputation at a humorous dramatist.
Historic pieces are always interesting to see in revival, and this is a phenomenally good one: the set alone raised applause, especially when the bed morphed into a lily pond complete with fountain. Converting the main house to an in-the-round venue is masterly, allowing James Button's effective evocation, with Chris Davey's lighting, of both the London flat and the affluent Buckinghamshire garden. The cast are splendid: Hubert Burton as the naive younger man in love with Ginny (Louise Calf),  Tim McMullan as the man he asks for her hand in a misunderstanding only the audience is following, and Caroline Harker as Sheila, bemused but endlessly hospitable as her garden fills with people talking at cross purposes.
Directed by Jo Newman and showing till 28th September - worthing going for an evening of laughter especially if you feel this would be a good time to slip back fifty years a more optimistic past.

Frome Writers Collective recommenced the monthly get-together evening at the Three Swans with an event I sadly missed - my fingers are beginning to type that phrase on auto, sigh - which from reports was much enjoyed: the readings, by their authors, of the stories created by the Writers In Residence at Frome Festival, back in July. 
In case composing a tale 'in residence' sounds a leisurely sort of activity, these brave scribes are 'residing' for couple of hours in public, in a shop or cafe, responding to an unknown prompt delivered in sealed envelope at the start of their enterprise, and their efforts are seized on completion of the specified time... it's writing, Jim, but not as we know it.  Lots of enjoyment though, and all the results admired, with Sarah Deacon's piece chosen as winner of the Alan Somerville award, duly presented on Monday by his wife Jo. Here's Sarah back in June, busy spinning the web of words that won the judges' hearts.

Also on the theme of Frome's writers, Nikki Lloyd was selected as a reader at September's Novel Nights in Bath at Burdall's Yard. This prestigious event follows an effective formula: the first half is a 'writers' showcase' introduced by organiser Grace Palmer and, after a short networking break, Colette Hill introduces a talk, this one by The Bath Novel Awards - immenstely interesting to all fiction writers. Sadly I was already committed, but I look forward to hearing about this from my writing group. I don't know who took the picture of Nikki for their flyer (not me, though I wish it had been!)

Two new exhibitions opened at Black Swan Arts on Friday. The Long Gallery features work by Fiona Hingston: The English Woman's Flora consists of 3D floral sprigs made from wire, masking tape, and graphite, all based on the illustrations in the Observer Book of Wild Flowers. Each one takes an hour and a half to create, so the 200 exhibits here represent 300 hours of work.
The Round Tower also has a new exhibition, showing the work of the Black Swan Guild in response to the theme BODY:art. This varied and very impressive collection from ten guild members also includes pieces by 3 guest artists and represents a fascinating variety of amazing work, from a vivid study for a cobra tattoo to Dan Morley's delicate drawings of his partner's tiny earring. Kate Cochrane's series of scary images of the Skeleton Woman fascinated me too - a really interesting variety of interpretations on the theme - on till 6 October.

Frome hasn't yet settled into its autumnal rhythm of regular events music-wise, but on Thursday The Valley with Nicola Mascall and Steve Loudoun brought their funky country style with an edge of reggae rhythms to an appreciative audience at the Cornerhouse.

Nunney Acoustic Cafe returned after its summer break for an afternoon of varied musical acts. Frome duo Harding McCabe took the main guest spot with an all-original set including some experimental approaches and themes ranging from flâneuring in London to the voyages of Odysseus.  Strong support acts included Shane Fry with Charles Daniel, Paul Kirtley, and two talented youngsters: Ezra Herring on keyboard and Ben Remington on electric guitar,.