The first ever Gloucester Poetry Festival is almost upon us - Saturday (21st Oct 2017) sees events starting off with an extra special Food for Thoughts at the Cafe Rene 2-5 pm. This is followed by the Gloucester Waterstones Villanelles on Sunday 2-4 pm complete with Poetry Roulette and me co-hosting!
Then on Thursday the Festival proper begins with a plethora of events 🙂 So check it out!
And then of course there is the really exciting news! The Gloucester Societies first ever poetry collection has arrived and is a gorgeous book!
Copies of Poetry Without Pretension will be at all the festival events and are also purchasable from my publishing group The WigglyPet Press.
Poetry pouches containing limited edition Poetry Festival 2017 badges will also be being given out at events until we run out!
Monday night I inflicted my childrens poetry on an audience in the Waterstones Cheltenham as part of the Villanelles series run by The Gloucester Poetry Society.
This beautiful photo of the reading was taken by Kurt Schroeder Photography which is a challenge as I can't really do flash photography and the light levels were poor!
The The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry has been getting out and about again - Last weekend saw me take the baby yeti (Alaric) to Cheltenham Library along with El Nosy Rat for the Fun Palaces Event.
It's interesting to note that the outfit Alaric is wearing is the reason there is a poem with the line "One Daddy dressed as a Yeti" in it and now he puts the outfit on for the poetry readings! It was originally made for a Yeti Hunt when we first started up the Cranham Scouting sections 🙂
At the poetry readings he is a naughty baby yeti who is also very shy and has a habit of hiding until the children call him to come out! This time the baby yeti stole Jean's shoes! When I took him to the climbing wall he kept hanging upside down! That baby YETI!
El Nosy Rat also features in one of the poems which he is a bit disgruntled about as it feels it gives rats a bad name! He is a relatively new member of the performance team and is also known as Ratty The Plague Rat/Black Death Rat when he comes out on Cuddly Science outings 🙂
He is a big hit with the kids and talks with a bit of an Eastend twang. In the photo above he his holding on of the lovely cloth patches of the Mummy Eating Cherry Pie (one of the poems and illustrations from the book). I had these made last year and they are in some of my surprise pouches! These were made by White Wizard Purple Elf who also made Jean's beautiful dark fairy hoody. Talking of surprise pouches I did kind of forget I they were also glitter bombs so covered the Children's Library in glitter 0.o
Last year I also spent ages tracing some of the pictures from the book so that I could turn them into black and white colouring sheets. The idea is that eventually all the illustrations will be up for free down load and maybe even as an actual colouring book. I tend to be a bit slow going with this as I do a little bit every September and October. But it did mean that this year I had lots of pictures ready for digital clean up and conversion to colouring in sheets 🙂
I am steadily popping them all on WigglyPets Press - including the older ones I made which have some colour traits like the pumpkin outlines being orange 🙂
There are still quiet a few to be traced and scanned still but that along with new audio files will have to await my new computer!
And talking of audio files don't forget you can listen to the poems on my bandcamp though it is still missing it's story and song to be a proper collection 🙂
Or you can watch a much younger Jeany reading the poems and a baby Mary trying to join in 🙂
I only have about 20 of my original print run left, after they have gone the book will be a more expensive print on demand thing on Amazon. And a second volume is also wending it's way to completion 🙂
But that will be a tale for another year!
But before I leave you I shall explain why it is the Spoogy book and not a Spooky book - when she was 4 yrs old Jean asked me if we could make a poetry book for halloween and so we did about topics she picked... that book was all hand drawn and written and did not contain all ten poems that later appeared in The Little Book it also got a cup of water knocked over on it shortly after it's creation as Jean has it in her tray table next to her bed - the tray table where she was allowed her night time water as if it was spilt it would all stay in the tray!
The 4 yr old Jean could not say Spooky - 4 yr old Jean said Spoogy and the book was for her, I've been asked to change it for "proper" publication but the poems are what they are - first and for most for my kids and the Spoogy bit is an essential part of that. If you are interested here is the blog post from when I made the book back in 2009.
Ok so seriously are there going to be any women who wouldn't be eligible to write "Me Too" on their statuses?
For those who don't know there is a Status meme and has tag going around social media to highlight the amount of sexual harassment and abuse that women get (including trans etc).
And there is a lot of it - especially if you include catcalling - that's kind of it as soon as you walk down a street on your own and as for public transport at night... I've lost count of the number of willies that have come out for a waggle. And these are not "serious" things, then there is crowd groping, the old rubby rubby which again are kind of hazards of travelling, followed by school yard bar pings and skirt lifts and then we are into the deathly serious rape area which if it hasn't happened to you tends to be a thing you fear will happen to you - hence all the special kits given out to female students when you start uni and the "rape" alarms put in the toilets in the student unions though obviously you aren't officially allowed to call them that though all the staff do. And why bus drivers give me warnings about which stops to get off at at night and so on.
There are reasons that we considered self defence to be a high priority to teach to our kids and that Jean knows protocols for being followed on her way home from school or being approached etc... and the issue doesn't end at us letting her out on her own - I am a small woman - last summer saw us being surrounded by teenage boys and having verbal sexual and horrible (mistaken) racial slurs thrown at us (shortly before they covered our van in shit). Initially they hadn't seen Alaric, and from a distance he is often mistaken as a women anyway and you can see peoples body language and aggression levels change when they realise he is a man and one who is not going to back down - interestingly it didn't even occur to me to report the intimidation and verbal abuse it was only because we called in to report the poo incident that it got reported.
But even when she was much younger we were getting catcalled resulting in me having to explain certain words to her.
When laid out bare like this it makes our society look pretty sick and ill at ease with itself and quiet frankly not very advanced.
Recently I discovered that some universities in this country only started admitting women in 1987 and that was protested at! I was six years old in a country being led by a female PM and a Queen - I still need to chase the facts up but between that and single mothers still forcefully having their babies removed in the 70's it is a rather slower march to equality than I had envisioned.
This event is aimed at kids and is ticketed at £5 per child, there is puppet story telling, colouring in sheets, Robo Robs Jobs the board game as well as the OhBot programmable robot head and the simple graphics programme. I am very excited about how this event is shaping up 🙂
Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annul celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), named after the Victorian mathematician and visionary Ada Lovelace.
Each year we try to do a little write up on women who have inspired us in the sciences. There are many entries for previous years - in fact later today I am going to make a special category for them all 🙂
Rebecca started off in Geology studying at Imperial College's Royal School of Mines, where she not only excelled in her own studies but helped me with some of the more advanced GeoChemistry elements, lending books and explaining things in multiple ways.
She was part of the posse that went with me to the Natural History Museum London to get work experience and helped me get into the meteoritics department. A PhD at the Planetary and Space Science Institute looking for organic material in micrometeorites.
She went on to post doc and research and science outreach at Leicester University and the associated Space Centre. During this time she developed some pretty awesome out reach kits. Those that can be available to the public/teachers are downloadable here.
Rebecca also won an science journalism internship which took her to Ireland, she has in fact been all over the globe studying, researching and presenting.
She has side stepped into medical data visualisation realm where she is pushing the frontiers of science ever forwards as well as highlighting the issues of accessibility on her various travels.
Rebecca has rubbed shoulders with the top people in both space and planetary science as well as within the deep data computering spheres not to mention the odd science communicator such as Brian Cox! Becca he is highly versatility and extremely dedicated and she is also a hell of a lot of fun to be around 🙂
She was even chosen by Jean for a school project on role models and heros!
Books, Events and Outings, Poems, Wiggly Pets | sarah | 
Fri 20th Oct 2017 9:48 am | 
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