Blogs

Hi everyone, I want to alert members to a forthcoming and prestigious poetry competition. It's a collaboration between the RSPB and The Rialto magazine based on the theme 'Nature'. The cost of entry is £6 for a single submission with subsequent submissions costing £3 each thereafter. A maximum of six poems are allowed in any one batch per individual entrant. Generous cash prizes are on offer with £1000 for the winner, £500 for the runner-up and...

Slam poetry is a contest with rules, so my shot at the Bike Shed theatre in Exeter is probably the same set up as anytown. You get 3 minutes and get scored by 3 judges out of 20 on the poem, performance and intensity of audience response. The bad news is that scoring is public. The good news is that all the poets were good and I would enjoy hearing any of them again. There were about 70 in the audience they seemed friendly if a little bland; a...

I’ve been thinking of writing a book about poverty, and the cancerous growth of agencies as middlemen that add nothing but misery, leaving the rest of us to deal with the hidden costs. It’s too big a subject. You start getting lost in minutiae. What does it mean in a changing world, for example, to be working class? What does it mean to be poor? These are relative concepts. I once asked my former best mate Liam what the girl he got off with the...

Every day is All Fools Day when you’re just being yourself. Same beginning. Then two trillion -or more- cells later, we come apart. In between we acquire a repertoire of habits. Vincent Deary’s ‘How we are’, the first in his trilogy of How to Live, picks apart what makes us ourselves. In essence, a person and their reality, make up their personality. That’s me speaking, not Deary (and what a wonderful name for a pseudo-philosopher). I was...

Congratulations this week go to Mark Brown for one of the best pieces of flash fiction I've read and to Ewan for his wonderfully dark poem: http://www.abctales.com/story/markbrown/those-we-leave-behind http://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/light-gibbous-moon This week's Inspiration Point is poetry or prose on the theme of moving - and you can interpret that any way you want. Don't forget if you have an idea for the Inspiration Point we'd love to...

It’s National Poetry day so I thought I’d look at Edward Hirsch’s (2014) Gabriel: A Poem . I’m not qualified to write about poetry. I’m not qualified to write about grief. Edward Hirsch is qualified on both counts. He wrote A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem both of which I intend to buy. Poetry is a foreign country and I’d like to learn the language. I might even attempt a few of the mangled phrases that novices use and, with a lot of...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025zl7d/the-secret-life-of-books-5... I’m a big fan of Jane Eyre and that Charlotte Bronte, well, she’s well hot too. We all know the story of little orphan Jane Eyre all alone in the world. She’s a plain girl with a fiery temper. In the opening pages she bests her bully of a cousin, John, and tells her Aunt Reed, who is her guardian, what’s what, which isn’t a winning combination. Only beautiful girls are...

Excellent news. Lots of congratulations to Laurie Avadis on achieving 100% of the funding that he needed to make his fantastic debut novel 'Ex' a reality. http://unbound.co.uk/books/ex Congratulations!

Laurie Avadis' Ex is on 93%! We really want to push him the rest of the way today - he only needs 9 more pledges to get to 100%. To incentivise the final supporters we're offering the chance to win two tickets to the launch party. We'll enter every supporter from now until 100% into a prize draw and pick a winner randomly. Here's the link: http://unbound.co.uk/books/ex

I needed to re-read this to understand how good the storytelling is; the first time I skipped bits as it is a bit who-dunnity. We are taken led the true tale of Agnes Magnusdottir, beheaded for murder in Iceland in 1830. Agnes was imprisoned with an Icelandic farming household until her execution to save money, rather than taking her to a prison in Copenhagen. The farmers had no choice, it was considered their civic duty and they got paid. The...