Hello Hubmarine at Derby Book Festival

The literature collective I'm involved with, Hello Hubmarine, are putting on this awesome shindig as part of Derby Book Festival. Headlining is Jon McGregor, who will be reading brand new work, and we also have the wonderful Éireann Lorsung, all the way from Dickinson House in Belgium. Special guests are Mark Gwynne Jones and Mamta Sagar, on their Arts Council England-funded, Renaissance One-produced Melding Voices tour, and we have music and audiovisual tinkering from Richard J. Birkin, who will be performing his groundbreaking Songs For Spoken Words. The mighty Joe Coghlan will also be performing his rhythmic spoken word story-poems, and I will have a story or two to share as well. Eeek!

So, it's Saturday 6th June, 6:30pm doors, and it's pay-what-you-decide (you'll be given an envelope on arrival and at the end, you can put in what you'd like/can afford to pay and then drop the envelope in our special box). See you there!

Noticing Nature

Along with my fellow Hello Hub compadres, I've been helping to run Derby Writers' Hub, and since last Autumn, we've been working with the wonderful Derby Museums on a collaborative project for their new Nature Gallery. The commission was to create stories and poems from a series of exhibits, with a view to these new writings becoming part of the Nature Gallery.

First off, we were given photographs of the animals that would feature in the Gallery. These included birds, a pangolin, and a sun bear amongst others. Next, we got to meet the actual specimens when Co-Production Curator Louise brought them to one of our Hub sessions. Sadly, the bear was too big to fit in her car (what, no sunroof?), but we did get to handle fossils from between 33-56 MILLION years ago. Which was nice.

And so over the following months we imagined, and scribbled, and edited, and chewed pens, and typed, and finally, we had ourselves a set of stories and poems all inspired by the nature exhibits. These were originally going to be displayed on cards, but after gathering them all together, Derby Museums decided on a booklet format, and then wondered if it could become an actual book that would be available for sale in the Museum shop. And yes, it could.

And so the project grew and grew and now this weekend, the Nature Gallery opens to the public, and from what I've seen and heard so far (esteemed pal Richard Birkin has created a soundscape for the Gallery using nature recordings and birdsong), it's going to be a real treat. And if you've been lucky enough to bag an invite to the launch event on the Friday eve, then you'll get to hear us reading our stories in the flesh, too.

Hey 2015!

Hello. A lot of things have happened since my last post. It's been a silly amount of time. I'm working on a new, proper website, which I'll be updating a bit more frequently than this poor blog. I'll post the details on here once it's up and running.

Upcoming things and events in the near-future are:

Tomorrow evening at Rough Trade in Nottingham, I'll be doing a reading of a couple of Lach's poems and a story of my own. I'm pretty excited about it.

And then in March, I'll be reading a specially commissioned piece at the opening of the new Nature Gallery at Derby Museum. More details to follow. Hey, I might even have my new website ready by then, and fill that full of the details too!

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